Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
The Guardian, one of my favorite news sources, is planning to publish an American edition. If it's anything like the British online version, well-written articles from a liberal perspective, I'll definitely subscribe (from BookNotes).

With my background as a theoretical physicist, the pentaquark discovery is rather exciting. A pentaquark is a combination of five quarks, in this case u u d d s-bar, instead of the standard two-quark (meson) and three-quark (baryon) configurations. Three Russian physicists calculated the pentaquark's mass and resonance width in 1997, and their estimates agreed perfectly with recent accelerator experiments in Japan and the U.S.

posted by Julian at 11:45 PM