Teaching "Symmetry" in the Introductory Physics Curriculum

Modern physics is largely defined by fundamental symmetry principles and Noether's Theorem. Yet these are not taught, or rarely mentioned, to beginning students, thus missing an opportunity to reveal that the subject of physics is as lively and contemporary as molecular biology, and as beautiful as the arts. We prescribe a symmetry module to insert into the curriculum, of a week's length.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

The Symmetries of Nature

The study of the symmetries of nature has fascinated scientists for eons. The application of the formal mathematical description of symmetries during the last century has produced many breakthroughs in our understanding of the substructure of matter. In this talk, a number of these advances are discussed, and the important role that George Sudarshan played in their development is emphasize

The Case for a Muon Collider Higgs Factory

We propose the construction of a compact Muon Collider Higgs Factory. Such a machine can produce up to \sim 14,000 at 8\times 10^{31} cm^-2 sec^-1 clean Higgs events per year, enabling the most precise possible measurement of the mass, width and Higgs-Yukawa coupling constants.Comment: Supporting letter for the document: "Muon Collider Higgs Factory for Smowmass 2013", A White Paper submitted to the 2013 U.S. Community Summer Study of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, Y. Alexahin, et. al, FERMILAB-CONF-13-245-T (July, 2013

The Innerspace/Outerspace Connection: History and Progress Report

Former faculty member at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, former director of Nevis Laboratory and Fermilab, Leon M. Lederman is Pritzker Professor of Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, and science advisor to the governor of Illinois. Born and bred in New York City, Lederman received his B.A. from City College in 1943, majoring in chemistry with a minor in physics, and (after a stint in the U.S. Army) his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1951. Lederman spent the next twenty-eight years at Columbia, directing Columbia\u27s Nevis Labs from 1961 to 1978, and doing research there and elsewhere around the world. He became the second director of Fermilab (Chicago) in 1979. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, and is now at IIT. In 1983 he received the Wolf Prize, and in 1988 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Mel Schwartz (Distinguished Science Lecturer, September 26, 1992) and Jack Steinberger. His work: With over two hundred research papers to his credit, Dr. Lederman is perhaps best known for his discovery of the B-quark (Wolf Prize) and the muon neutrino (Nobel Prize). Increasingly he has dealt with the more administrative aspects of high energy physics in particular and science in general. He was initiator and founding member of the governmental High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. During his term a director of Fermilab, the TEVATRON (the first superconducting synchrotron) was constructed and the SSC (the superconducting supercollider) was proposed. He has recently served as chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was founding trustee of a· residential public school for gifted children, and co-chairman of the board of a teacher\u27s academy. Finally, he has worked for investment in science and technology enterprises in Illinois. (Text taken from the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series Program 1993-1994).https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/dsls_1993_1994/1004/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the God particle

On July 4, 2012, the long-sought Higgs Boson--aka "the God Particle"--was discovered at the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland. On March 14, 2013, physicists at CERN confirmed it. This elusive subatomic particle forms a field that permeates the entire universe, creating the masses of the elementary particles that are the basic building blocks of everything in the known world--from viruses to elephants, from atoms to quasars