Back in Toronto

Above: I love the fact that I visited a place where I needed a GERT and Dosimeter for entry.

Jeff and I are back home. We had a momentary panic at the airport when we were told that our main checked bag came in over the weight limit (due more to stuff we were taking home for people rather than souvenirs :-), but Jeff redistributed the contents of our bags and the rest of our trip home went smoothly. Thanks to Walter for picking us up at the airport!



I have a ton of e-mail to catch up on, so if you have something urgent that needs answering sooner than later, please do put "URGENT" in the subject header.

Today's photos: some of the signs at the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory. Looking into the heart of an accelerator was one of the highlights of our California trip. Many thanks to my father-in-law and his friend for making the special visit possible! Bonus highlight: We had lunch in the SLAC cafeteria, and Martin Perl was at the next table. Perl won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton.

Comments

[Jeff K]

Hm, you should have let me know in advance, you could have told Martin I don't believe in the tau lepton nor the experimental validity of accelerator physics. I don't mean this in a harsh way, but did they give you the lecture about how they capture gigabytes of "data" from each "collision" looking for "things"? That, when I visited Fermi Lab in Chicago for the 2nd time back about 20 years ago, put me off particle physics forever, even though at age 7 I had memorized the names of all then extant sub-atomic particals.

And I especially mean no insult to jds who I respect in the utmost and am aware is still a research professional in the field, but who unfortunately I have not spoken to in too many years.

-jok

[John Chew]

A "GERT" is not a thing: it's an acronym for "General Employee Radiological Training".