Symmetry Magazine

There’s a new issue of Symmetry magazine out. It is a bimonthly magazine about particle physics put out by SLAC and Fermilab, and often has interesting and informative articles. But, even though I generally read the whole thing when it comes out, I’ve always had a feeling that, somehow, there was something missing. This latest issue kind of explains why.

In a very well-done article about the BaBar experiment and B-physics, John Ellis is quoted, explaining the origin of the name “penguin diagram” as follows:

That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin, who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.

For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time…. Later…I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If you look up the original source of this, you find a bit more of an explanation of where that “sudden flash” came from. Here’s the full second paragraph:

For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time. Then, one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lots of other articles worth reading in the magazine, including one by an undergraduate at Humboldt State in California about taking a science course that explained how physical reality is stranger than any fiction, ending with the anthropic principle and the theory of evolutionary cosmology. The course is called Cosmos, and you can check out its web-site. Maybe I’m wrong, but I get the impression that John Ellis is not the only physicist out there who may have at one time or other sampled the agricultural products of Humboldt County…

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10 Responses to Symmetry Magazine

  1. island says:

    ending with the anthropic principle and the theory of evolutionary cosmology

    A true anthropic cosmological principle *necessarily* defines a Darwinian Universe… which indicates that physicists pursuing this idea should be looking for a mechanism that enables a universe with pre-existing volume to “leap/bang” to higher orders of the same basic configuration… now, pass the bong, “hippie”… 😉

  2. Steve Myers says:

    On Cosmos-type classes. Maybe it’s possible to understand the physics without the math but I doubt it. I’ve found people who say that or “feel” that are just kidding themselves. If you can’t do the problems, I don’t think you understand the material. Would they say the same thing about their bank account?

  3. Chris Oakley says:

    I think that the likely explanation is that the game of darts was one of the things that Ellis hallucinated while smoking the illegal substances.

  4. Arun says:

    “Aspects of Symmetry”, Selected Erice Lectures, Sidney Coleman
    The 1979 lecture, 1/N, on the large N limit of SU(N) theories:

    “For the baryons, things are not so good. Witten’s theory is an analytical triumph but a phenomenological disaster”.

    For some reason, I found it very funny.

  5. Jimbo says:

    Looks like High-Times at Humbolt High ! And we only thought that such libations were confined to UC Santa Cruz ! Without doubt, one of the best physics course advertisements I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet his enrollment saturates in the first week.
    And lets not forget, that Sagan & Glashow both were heads (am I leaving anybout out ?), so there must be somethin to it.
    Should be a lotta phun !

  6. Thomas Love says:

    The biggest difference between science and science fiction is that fiction has to make sense. The biggest difference between science and mathematics is that science has to match reality. Mathematics can be used to model fictional universes as well as the one we live it. That is the problem with the landscape: too many fictional universes and we are not sure that there is one which matches reality! My PhD is from UC Santa Cruz and I got high by thinking about higher dimensions, no agricultural substances necessary!

  7. island says:

    But it is *people* who carelessly abuse the counterintuitive aspects of some theories to rationalize their way round appearance of absurdity that appears with others, thereby enabling them to avoid the most natural extensions in order that they might dodge causality and first principles in order to use “selection effects” to choose from a hypothetical and mathematically derived woulda’ could’a shoulda’ “what-if” landscape, instead of doing real physics.

    This goes WAY far back before ST became the only game in town though… That’s the kind of thing that Einstein used to bitch about… a LOT!

  8. Greg Biffle says:

    I spent the weekend reading original papers by Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg.

    Oddly enough, there was no mention of drug use, nor cutesy-wootsie dart games, nor insider wink-wink-nudge-nudge let’s get some cash from NSF to meet again next year for more darts and drugs.

    Physicists of yore seemed quite content to contemplate reality, and thus left us with lasting physics.

    There seemed no peer-pressure back then to smoke up in those glorius original papers.

    I hope that by and by we (and journals) can return to supporting physicists concentrating on advancing physics and contemplating the beauty and natural wonders of the world that surrounds us, rooting it all in humility, logic, reason, and a dedicated search forr the truth.

  9. Coin says:

    I spent the weekend reading original papers by Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg.

    Oddly enough, there was no mention of drug use, nor cutesy-wootsie dart games, nor insider wink-wink-nudge-nudge let’s get some cash from NSF to meet again next year for more darts and drugs.

    Clearly your mistake here was not including some Feynman in the mix.

  10. Peter Woit says:

    Greg,

    I’m deleting your latest comment. Please do not post rants and personal attacks on people here. You’re just adding heat and no light to the discussion. There’s too much of this already.

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