Fine Structure

Pardon me whilst I pimp my favorite blogging software. If you're serious about blogging, this is the best there is. I work at Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, so I can say with complete certainty that I am biased. But it's good, real good.

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Old, but just mentioned on Metafilter. Good resources for extra reading on topics in theoretical physics.

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Mark's questions about some corners of electromagnetism. He's asking really good questions that most freshmen don't think about and it's really fascinating that he can't get a straight answer.

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Less than a full sentence into Dorigo's recent article on new data from the Higgs search I realized that I needed to learn the definition of a femtobarn. Googling, I found a link to a great glossary of nuclear physics terms and their inceptions. Referring to the luminosity of a collider, a femtobarn is:

A unit of cross section equal to 10^-24 cm², more or less equivalent to the physical cross-sectional area of a typical nucleus.

And that really says something if your collider can't hit the broad side of a femtobarn. I've seen it used interchangeably between the formats "1.6/fb" or "1.6 inverse femtobarns" (perhaps I don't quite understand the purposes of the two formats, it's particularly confusing for a novice physicist though).

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