The Importance of Research

This is one of those topics that's just sort of close to my heart, so I thought I'd throw a post on it out there.

Oh Yeah, I forgot...

If ever any of this is not as clear as I had hoped, please let me know. I'd be glad to either rewrite something to clarify it, or to publish another post on the background of the topic.
More importantly, if you find a factual error, please, please, please let me know. I'm not a theorist, and I don't know everything about physics. This is my attempt to apply what I do know to try help other people understand physics, and see why it's something everyone should care about. So, I will eventually get something wrong if I haven't already. Please call me out on it, so I can post a correction.
Thanks guys, and hopefully you'll enjoy this as much as I have so far.

Update Schedule

So I honestly had planned on daily updates, and I do have the beginnings of a post for yesterday. However, some hard questions were asked right out of the gate, and I was distracted by other things as well. So, expect an update (a real update, not just this) sometime this afternoon. Also, there's apparently an issue with the comments system. So, I'll work on fixing that.

Mission: Science Talk

Hi guys,

I guess I should explain why I'm starting this blog. I'm an undergraduate researcher in particle physics, and I absolutely love it. Yesterday, I posted a result from my work that had me bouncing off the walls ("Might have found a bump in some backgrounds that corresponds to the kaon's mass :D Next question, is it statistical?") to my Facebook page. I was kind of sad by the first response: my brother, a soon-to-be college freshman, pointing out that he had no clue what something like that meant ("‎... i hate you and ur scientific talk xD jk but can u put this in laymans terms if ur goign to put it on fb"). 

And today, I got thinking, why can't someone try to explain for a general lay audience what's going on in particle physics? Really, there's not a good reason we can't try. Yeah, a lot of stuff is kind of technical, but if you start far enough back in the basics, you can give at least a qualitative feel for how stuff works in particle/nuclear physics. 

So that's what this blog is for. I know no one's reading it yet, but if/when people start reading it, I'd love to answer questions about the news in particle physics. In the near future, this blog will likely focus on what I'm doing and what it actually means. If anyone has any questions, I'd love to answer them. So, start emailing and commenting :D.