Users' Meeting begins today

The annual Fermilab Users' Meeting, begins at 9 a.m. today. This year's annual Users' Meeting will feature recent experiment results, the laboratory's future plans and physics updates from Washington, D.C. and around the world. The meeting, which will take place today and tommorrow, will provide Fermilab employees and users a chance to learn more about global physics projects and plans for experiments at Fermilab.

This year's highlights include lectures by: Department of Energy's Mike Procario, National Science Foundation's Jim Reidy, HEPAP's Mel Shochet, CERN's Sergio Bertolucci, KEK's Koichiro Nishikawa, and Fermilab's Director Pier Oddone.

A Tesla coil demonstration and an Indian and Italian Festa will follow an 8 p.m. public lecture tonight in Ramsey Auditorium. The lecture explains other, more contemporary uses for plasma. Tom Katsouleas, professor and dean, at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, will discuss the future of plasma wakefield accelerators and their industrial applications.

Users' festivities will continue into Thursday with the Wonders of Physics demonstration during lunchtime in the cafeteria.

Register for the meeting.

Credit where credit is due

Editor's note: The newest issue of symmetry magazine is now online.

In the swirling sea of thousands of people who contribute to a major particle physics experiment, how can a young physicist pop to the surface and get noticed? An international committee offers ideas.

Physicists around the world know the name Timo Aaltonen.

The Finnish graduate student has yet to complete his PhD. But since April 2007, members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, collaboration have credited almost all of their publications to "T. Aaltonen et al."

Particle physicists know that Aaltonen did not, in fact, write all of those papers. CDF publications list as authors every one of the collaboration members-all 602 of them-in alphabetical order. Before Aaltonen came along, the first author was "A. Abulencia."

The author list does not distinguish between the senior scientists who come up with ideas, the hardware specialists who helped design and build the machine and the grad students who put in long hours analyzing results. Some of those on the list might not have even read the paper because they are busy working on some other part of the experiment.

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-- Kathryn Grim

The unique universe

From Physicsworld.com, June 2, 2009

A tiny fraction of a second following the big bang, the universe allegedly experienced the most inflationary period it has ever known.

Three decades ago, talk of other universes was not seen by most physicists to be part of science. Most research in theoretical physics and cosmology concerned observable features in our universe and most papers and seminars referred to experimental results. However, since then there has been a gradual shift, during which it first became acceptable to work on theories that described not only our universe, but other possible universes, universes with less or more dimensions, or universes with different kinds of particles and forces. In the last few years, we have moved further away from theories of our one universe, as these other worlds went from being logically possible to hypothetically actual. It is now common to hear about the multiverse - a quantum cosmology that takes for granted that the visible universe that we see around us is just one of a vast or infinite number of universes.

The multiverse assumption often comes hand in hand with a metaphysical assumption regarding the nature of time. It has been argued by many experts in quantum cosmology that time is not a fundamental concept, but an approximate and emergent one. If this is correct, then we experience time in a timeless universe for reasons similar to why we, who live in a quantum universe, experience one that obeys classical physics: we are composed of very large numbers of fundamental particles and emergent statistical regular­ities determine much of what we experience.

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