When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis. It did not go well.
One of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!
Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is–in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses.
After seeing a documentary on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition, in which men ate shoe leather to survive in bone-chilling temperatures, David Peterson felt kind of silly about letting snow stop his bicycle ride to work.
Tokio Ohska had an opera to direct. As always, there were lighting, scenery, and music issues to contend with. But finding costumes to fit a cast of Europeans? That was a new challenge.
