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Re: banning calculators



I stand corected. Thanks for the clarification

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack Uretsky" <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: March 15, 2002 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: banning calculators


Misapprehension-

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, FOUAD AJAMI wrote:
In labs, the introduction of probes (black boxes) has shifted the
activities
to another focus. At the most eminent levels of the profession, nobody
expects a particle physicist to build his own accelerator.

The spirit of the last sentence is absolutely wrong. The
"particle physicist" needs to be closely attuned to the details of
accelerator design. These are the details that determine the backgrounds
in the experiments.
Even the theorist needs to understand the experimental
details, because it is necessary to evaluate the credibility of every
experiment and the accompanying analyses.
Back when Feynman & Gell-Mann proposed V-A for beta decay,
they had the intuition to argue convincingly that one of the commonly
accepted experiments was wrong. They were correct. It was.

Just another confused contribution, until I get things clearer.

Fouad Ajami
Physics Department
Champlain College
St Lambert, Qc, Canada
Tel: 450-672-7360-272
Fax: 450-672-7299


--
"But as much as I love and respect you, I will beat you and I will kill
you, because that is what I must do. Tonight it is only you and me, fish.
It is your strength against my intelligence. It is a veritable potpourri
of metaphor, every nuance of which is fraught with meaning."
Greg Nagan from "The Old Man and the Sea" in
<The 5-MINUTE ILIAD and Other Classics>