Marie Skłodowska-Curie: The scientist, the legacy, the grants

by Anna Stakia

Maria Skłodowska was born on November 7^th, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland (in the part then dominated by the Russian Empire). Being brought up in a family of teachers, Maria quickly grew interest in acquiring higher education; this was initially and partly achieved through attending Warsaw’s local schools, but also within her own family environment, receiving some scientific training from her father.

On acquiring skills – shu, ha, ri

by Giles Strong

For the past six or so years, I’ve practised a martial art called Shorinji Kempo. Like many other arts, it incorporates several philosophies and concepts. One of these, The Three Teachings of Ken, concerns one’s progression in learning the various techniques. Simply put, it describes three stages of mastery: shu – learn & copy, ha – adjust & adapt, ri – master & break free.

Plans for next Summer? Start a career in particle physics!

by Fabricio Jiménez

This is the time of the year when I start to reach out to as many undergraduates in physics (and similar subjects) as possible. My yearly mantra for them: “Apply to summer internships!” I cannot emphasize how much my two internships shaped my life and career, from fortuitously having breakfast with a Nobel laureate, the living legend Jack Steinberger (and maybe a story to tell in another post) to hands-on work in physics analyses for the LHC and making friends from all across the globe.

Summarising blog content

by Greg Kotkowski

A year ago I posted an article that visualised with word clouds subjects touched by the authors of this blog. The clouds contained stemmed and filtered nouns and verbs used in posts for each author that had produced at least 3 articles. Giles had suggested to take up the argument again the following year for a comparison, so here it is.

Things that Decay into Boson Pairs

by Tommaso Dorigo

Writing a serious review of research in particle physics is a refreshing job – all the things that you already knew on that specific topic once sat on a fuzzy cloud somewhere in your brain, and now find their place in a tidily organized space, with clear interdependence among them. That’s what I am experiencing as I progress with a 60-pageish thing on hadron collider searches for diboson resonances, which will appear sometime next year in a very high impact factor journal.

One of the things that the review must cover is a theoretical overview of the models that the searches for these physics processes address. So I thought I would say a few words on this topic here – but bear in

UCL – where tradition meets the future

by Christophe Delaere

Aiming at the broadening and transmission of human knowledge, university is one of the best inventions of the Middle Ages. The Université catholique de Louvain has played a part in this process with pride since 1425. Just to cite a few: Erasmus, Vésale, Mercator and many others came to Louvain to profit from its location at the heart of Europe.