Herman White to give 'crash course' at Boston conference

The NSBP conference is being held in Boston from February 21 to February 25.

Fermilab physicist Herman White is offering a crash course in physics terms for undergraduate attendees at the annual conference of the National Society of Black Physicists in Boston. "Right now, it looks like the tutorial talk will be at 8:30 in the morning [Thursday]," White said from his cell phone yesterday, as he waited to catch a ride to Harvard. "The idea is to give the undergraduate students a little working knowledge about physics before they go to the more advanced talks during the rest of the meeting."

Herman White

The annual conference, held jointly with the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, connects more than 500 minority physicists, students and professionals from institutions and universities across the country. "It's a chance for African-American and Hispanic physicists to interact with one another, and also get a chance to stimulate the students," said White. "The goal is to offer exposure and motivation to students who might be interested physics, and to give them access to a path they might want to pursue."

White first learned of the precursor to NSBP more than 30 years ago, during an informal meeting of African-American physicists held at Fermilab in 1974. "That was the first time that I knew an organized group of African-American physicists existed," said White. The group was officially founded under its current name in 1977, and Fermilab hosted an NSBP meeting four years after that, bringing together luminaries such as Shirley Jackson, who had previously conducted research at Fermilab and was then working at Bell Laboratories, and Michael Burns of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Fermilab's Elliot Treadwell gave a talk at the 1981 meeting, and White compiled the proceedings, which are available in the Fermilab library.

At this year's meeting, White looks forward to mingling with colleagues as well as connecting with students. "I have the program in my hand, and it has 40 pages-worth of talks," he said. "It will certainly be exciting."
--Siri Steiner

Read more about this year's conference on the NSBP Website.

Participants of the 1981 NSBP meeting take a tour of Fermilab.

Widening the Gateway to India

The 'Gateway to India' in Mumbai.

By typing in a simple command on Monday, February 12, Gavin McCance initiated the first file transfer between CERN and India on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.

Connection via the WLCG will give Indian researchers the same level of access to Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiments as researchers in European or North American countries.

"It's a good feeling to be involved in a collaboration like this," says McCance, WLCG/CERN.
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Thick as pea soup: AD's Charlie King sent this picture of yesterday's dense fog, which dropped visibility to less than a quarter-mile in some areas.

Scientific American
March 2007 issue:

Alone at the Top

The world's biggest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, will come on line in a few months. Even so, for the next few years it may have a hard time upstaging the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., which appears to have generated "single" top quarks. The finding, reported last December, helps to narrow the search for the long sought after Higgs particle and raises the possibility that Fermilab will find it before the LHC does.
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