PANIC trouble
When physicists organized the first Particles and Nuclei International Conference in 1963, nobody thought that the acronym PANIC could cause trouble in getting the word out about the meeting. That was before the now-common use of email. Sending out information about the 17th PANIC conference, held in Santa Fe in October 2005, organizers discovered that email messages with a subject line containing the word PANIC often did not reach their destination. Welcome to the world of spam filters.
Of course, organizers quickly learned to avoid the problem. More than 500 physicists and 80 students accepted the invitation and attended the meeting, bringing together nuclear and particle physicists from over 20 countries. From neutrino physics to the strong force to high-energy collisions, speakers summarized research results from around the world. The students were the judges for the best talk, voting for Boris Kayser, Fermilab, and his talk on "Status and New Opportunities in Neu-trino Physics." Angela Olinto, University of Chicago, and Mark Trodden, University of Syracuse, were runners-up.
The next PANIC conference will take place in Eilat, Israel, in 2008. The first PANIC conference in Israel took place in 1967—long before the introduction of spam filters. Conference organizers, please take note.
Kurt Riesselmann
Click here to download the pdf version of this article.
