Calendar of Astronomy Events in Southeast Michigan

The University Lowbrow Astronomers (Lowbrows for short) maintains an astronomy calendar. This calendar is focused on events in the Southeast Michigan area and includes:

1. Open Houses at Peach Mountain Observatory (located near Dexter Michigan).
2. Club Meetings of the Lowbrows (held on the central campus of the University of Michigan).
3. Other astronomy events that may be of interest in the Southeast Michigan Area.

You don't need to be a club member or affiliated with the University of Michigan to attend these events. There are four different ways to view the calendar:

1. Go to the web page: http://www.umich.edu/~lowbrows/calendar/

2. If you have an Android tablet or smartphone, you can download the Lowbrow App at

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.lowbrows.lowbrowapp

This app is free. You can view the calendar directly from the app.

3. If you use a calendar program that supports the ICAL format (such as Google Calendar), you can subscribe to the Lowbrow Calendar by using the subscribe function within your calendar program. This will allow you to view Lowbrow events along with the events in your personal calendar and/or other calendars. When subscribing to the calendar, you will be asked for a URL. This is the URL:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/lowbrowcalendar%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

4. If you use a calendar program that supports the ICAL format (such as Google Calendar), you can take a snapshot by downloading this file:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/lowbrowcalendar%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

and importing it into your program. The events in the Lowbrow calendar will be added to events already in your calendar, but if there are changes to the Lowbrow calendar they will not be automatically incorporated into your calendar without a subsequent import.

2013 Saturday Morning Physics

The schedule for Winter Term 2013 Saturday Morning Physics is now available. There are a series of 8 talks, held Saturday Mornings between February 2 and April 13. (There are no talks on February 22 and March 1). The February 2nd talk will be held in Hill Auditorium on the campus of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The other talks will be held in rooms 170 and 182 of the Dennison Building also on the campus of the University of Michigan.

For more information go to: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/physics/events/saturdaymorningphysics

The Higgs Boson and Supersymmetry.

On Wednesday night (November 14) Gordy Kane (the Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan) gave a presentation for this November's Science Cafe. The Ann Arbor Science Cafes are hosted by the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (formerly known as the Exhibit Museum) and are typically held once a month (except in summer).

Gordy's presentation was the Higg's Boson: What’s it all about?  What’s the evidence? What does it mean? What are the next steps? More info about the November Science Cafe.

One of my earlier posts talked about the Higg's (see "Saturday Morning Physics (October 6)"), I wont repeat that here, instead I'm going to describe what's next for CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.

Now that we have established that the Higgs boson exists, there is still work on probing the properties of the Higgs boson (or Higg bosons). But there is another unanswered question: supersymmetry.

What is supersymmetry? The standard model describes a collection of elementary particles. The most commonly observed of these particles are the photon, electron, up quark and down quark. The photon is responsible for light and the electric and magnetic forces (which physicists describe as a single electromagnetic force). The electron, up and down quarks combine to form protons, neutrons, atoms and molecules in the everyday world. Less commonly observed are two heavier versions of the electron, particles called neutrinos, four heavier quarks and various antiparticles. The photon belongs to a group of particles known as "bosons," there are other bosons as well. (See Wikipedia "The Standard Model").

Supersymmetry is an extension to the standard model: if supersymmetry is correct, each particle in the standard model has a "supersymmetric partner". The photo has a new partner called the photino. The electron has a new partner called the selectron. And so on. This doubles the number of particles. However none of these new particles have been observed, at least so far. (See Wikipedia "Supersymmetry").

The Large Hadron Collider is starting to look for these particles. If you are optimistic, it is possible hints of these new particles might show up in the next few months. A more cautious prediction: those hints might show up in the next few years.

So why care about supersymmetry? Knowledge gained from quantum mechanics and general relativity resulted in technologies such as transistors, computers, laser scanners, GPS, etc; probing the elementary structure of matter may result in new applications that we can't imagine today. Also supersymmetry may explain "dark matter": it is possible that dark matter is composed of supersymmetric particles. If we can prove these particles exist experimentally, that may help us understand dark matter.

(An outline of gravity and dark matter can be found at Gravity, Part 4: Globular Clusters & Galaxies. by Dave Snyder. Reflections of the University Lowbrow Astronomers: October, 2006).

Saturday Morning Physics (October 6)

On October 6, 2012 Bing Zhou, (Professor and Associate Chair of Physics at the University of Michigan) gave the talk "The New Particle Discovery at LHC with the ATLAS Experiment." This was the first Saturday Morning Physics talk for Fall 2012. Saturday Morning Physics is hosted by the University of Michigan Physics Department.

After decades of searching, evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson was finally found at CERN. This is a tremendous step forward in Physics made possible through the efforts of the LHC experiments (ATLAS and CMS). These experiments were a international collaboration involving many institutions including the University of Michigan. Professor Zhou presented a brief history on the Higgs hunting in the past decades. She reported the experimental evidence of the new particle discovery and ongoing research related to the studies of the new particle with the ATLAS experiment.

What is the Higgs boson? In the 60's a group of physicists independently proposed the following idea: add a new field permeating space that gives particles mass, and a new particle (or a group of related particles) that creates this field. These are usually called the Higgs field and the Higgs boson(s) respectively, after Peter Higgs. Peter Higgs is one of the physicists who originally proposed the mechanism and is currently professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Higgs is shown in the slide above.

Bing Zhou answering questions from the audience.

Watch the video of this talk.
Saturday Morning Physics Website.
Photo Album, Lowbrows at Saturday Morning Physics.

(Photos from John Causland).

Minute Physics

We ran across this site: Minute Physics .

There are a number of interesting short videos covering various physics topics. At the time I post this, the video at the top was "Why is it Dark at Night?", which caught my eye, but there are other interesting videos as well.

If your first language is English and you have no desire to translate videos into other languages, ignore the language stuff.

Lowbrow Photo Album

For those you interested in some of the events the Lowbrows have been involved in over the years, go to the Lowbrow Photo Album.