Physicists

Forget about bending it like Beckham -- can you curve it like Carlos? All right, so this is a little beyond the normal health boundaries, but for more of our active, sporty, specifically soccer-loving readers, a new study in the New Journal of Physics solves the longstanding mystery of whether a dramatic goal in an international match more than a decade ago was due to athletic skill or dumb luck. The French researchers looked at a famous free kick goal made by Brazilian player Roberto Carlos against the French team in the 1997 Tournoi de France.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, who has led the prestigious campus since 2004 through state budget cuts, Nobel Prizes and campus protests, announced Tuesday that he would step down Dec. 31. A Canadian-born physicist who is turning 70 this month, Birgeneau said he has stayed on the job longer than he originally anticipated because he wanted to leave the campus in stable financial shape. Although funding challenges remain, Birgeneau told reporters Tuesday that he "didn't want to step down until I was comfortable that we'd reached some kind of equilibrium with our budget.

The budget guillotines are being sharpened. The aristocracy that rules America's science and technology establishment is about to be deposed. It will be messy. For nearly two generations, physicists have dominated American science. It's not just that physicists were smarter or more charismatic than other scientists--or even that they gave the world the transistor. They had built the Bomb.

German physicist Heinrich Hertz has been honored with his very own wavy Google Doodle on what would have been his 155th birthday. In case you aren't sure just what old Heinrich is responsible for, here is a hint: The metric unit Hertz (Hz), which stands for the number of cycles per second of any kind of phenomena, and is frequently used to describe radio and audio waves, is named after him. Noticing a wAvY theme here? PHOTOS: Google Doodles 2012 Hertz, who was born on Feb. 22 in 1857, was the first person to conclusively prove the existence of electromagnetic waves back in the late 1880s, and it was his experiments with electromagnetic waves that paved the way for the invention of radio, television and radar -- what we now know as the “wireless age.” Amazingly, he did all of this before his death at the age of 36 from Wegener's granulomatosis, a rare disease that results in the inflammation of the blood vessels.

British and Japanese scientists at the multinational T2K particle-physics project in Japan said Friday that they have observed the experiment's first neutrino to travel 185 miles underground across the Asian country, indicating that the project is now ready to begin doing physics. Although not on the massive scale of Europe's new Large Hadron Collider, which is also just beginning to conduct experiments, the T2K project is expected to shed light on the oscillations of the mysterious elementary particles known as neutrinos and, in the process, perhaps explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

The late physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to get furious when people told him he should act in a certain (usually conventional) way because, they argued, this was the "real world"; one had to adjust. He responded: "It's not the real world. It's a world we made up." While Oppenheimer was usually referring to social expectations or the administration of the science museum he founded, he was also speaking as a true physicist.

Physicists announced Tuesday that they had detected "tantalizing hints," but not definitive proof, of the long-sought Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is crucial to physicists' understanding of why mass exists in the universe. Two large teams of scientists based at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva separately saw what they believe are telltale tracks of the maddeningly elusive particle in the aftermath of about 400 trillion proton collisions carried out since January.

Albert Einstein had the idea. A century of observations have backed it up. It's one of the cornerstones of physics: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But now a team of experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, says that one exotic particle possibly can. The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away.

A blue-ribbon panel of physicists cast strong doubt Thursday on the feasibility of a "Star Wars" missile defense system based on lasers and other directed-energy weapons. In response, proponents of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative called the 424-page study "largely irrelevant" because it ignored more feasible, kinetic-energy weapons being sought for early deployment.

In a major rebuff to the Soviet Union's scientific establishment, Soviet physicists Friday nominated Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov to run as a candidate in nationwide parliamentary elections scheduled for March. The overwhelming vote in favor of the 67-year-old human-rights advocate by his colleagues at Moscow's leading physics institute came only two days after his candidacy was rejected by the governing board of the Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Hawking An Unfettered Mind Kitty Ferguson Palgrave Macmillan: 320 pp., $27 Today is Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday. It's an event worth marking, not least for its profound unlikelihood. As many even outside the physics community know, he learned about 50 years ago that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease). He was given two years to live. However, at the time he was just coming into his own as a theoretical physicist, and he couldn't be bothered to die. Kitty Ferguson, a graduate of Juilliard and author of this intelligent and readable biography, "Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind," is astonishing in her own right.

Who hasn't caught a snowflake in a mitten and marveled at its star-like detail, and then recalled that no two snowflakes are alike? But these crystals of ice are even more varied than one might imagine — there are needle-like snowflakes, hollow-column snowflakes and flakes that look like delicate dumbbells, with two joined together by a column. Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht, who studies the crystalline structure of snowflakes and has published seven books of snowflake photographs, talked to The Times about what we do, and don't, know about them.

Physicists announced Tuesday that they had detected "tantalizing hints," but not definitive proof, of the long-sought Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is crucial to physicists' understanding of why mass exists in the universe. Two large teams of scientists based at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva separately saw what they believe are telltale tracks of the maddeningly elusive particle in the aftermath of about 400 trillion proton collisions carried out since January.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a physicist, not a politician, but he was unflappable under attack from Republicans and refused to apologize for a $535-million loan guarantee given to now-bankrupt solar equipment maker Solyndra. In his first appearance before Congress since the Solyndra controversy broke nearly three months ago, Chu firmly pushed back against allegations that political favoritism and bureaucratic incompetence led his agency to approve the Solyndra loan guarantee. "Was there incompetence?"

Science, which is confusing to many people — some to the point that they regard it as a form of superstition — has always needed its champions, its spokespersons, its interpreters, big brains who also function efficiently as celebrities and have a knack for taking impossible-sounding theories and making them sound, at least for the moment they're speaking, comprehensible. Here comes Brian Greene, again. (He is TV's favorite theoretical physicist.) Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking before him, Greene — whose "The Fabric of the Cosmos" begins a four-week run Wednesday in the framework of the PBS series "Nova" — is both mediagenic and a working scientist.

After smashing atoms together for 26 years, the Tevatron particle accelerator powered down on Friday. The 4-mile-long ring-shaped accelerator, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., was built to hurl tiny bits of matter at each other in the hopes that they would break apart into the basic building blocks of the universe. Though the Tevatron made major discoveries, it became essentially obsolete after the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva began conducting experiments in 2009.

The father of Israel's atomic program renounced his country's top prize in protest at its being awarded also to an Israeli-Arab writer. Physicist Yuval Neeman, an ultranationalist politician, compared winning novelist Emile Habibi to Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler's favorite composer whose works are banned in the Jewish state. Habibi was the first Arab to win the prestigious Israel Prize for literature.

Positioning itself firmly against Pat Buchanan, the state branch of the Reform Party endorsed a little-known physicist for president Thursday. "I never knew being so far behind was such an asset," joked John Hagelin, who hopes to wrest the nomination from front-runner Buchanan in the nationwide mail-in primary that started this week. Since party founder Ross Perot has decided against running, Hagelin has emerged as the sole challenger to Buchanan for the nomination and $12.

Albert Einstein had the idea. A century of observations have backed it up. It's one of the cornerstones of physics: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But now a team of experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, says that one exotic particle possibly can. The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away.

Physicist John H. Marburger III, who served as President George W. Bush's science advisor at a time when most researchers considered science to be under attack by the government, died July 28 at his home in Port Jefferson, N.Y. He was 70 and had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He also served as dean of USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, as president of State University of New York at Stony Brook and as head of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. "Jack Marburger was a superb advocate for science, a visionary leader, and a highly skilled administrator who successfully led three vital institutions," said Dr. Samuel L. Stanley Jr., the current president of Stony Brook.