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Hi Everybody,
On Friday, January 14, I visited Rick Dower's class
at Roxbury Latin, for the first time this semester.
It was a small class of seniors with a solid
background in particle physics. They had just rediscovered the
Omega^-
particle (just in case, it's an ssstrange baryon --
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/omega.html),
and were currently analyzing the Tevatron data to determine the top quark mass
-- http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/physics/new/top/top.html
These kids may know more about the standard model
than some of my respected fellow stringers!
Having such a sophisticated audience, I decided to
follow a very conservative path, an gave them some glimpse what's still ahead of
us: Higgs particle?, neutrino masses?, fourth generation? more gauge bosons
mediating new forces? At the end I spent few minutes explaining how gravity and
strings may fit into all of this. We will see -- if students are interested in
outer frontiers, I will return to talk about supersymmetry, extra dimensions and
superstrings.
I hope that everybody else has already made plans
for their initial visits.
Please e-mail your impressions.
Regards,
Tom.
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