Dear alumni, colleagues, and friends,
October 4 was a banner day for Johns Hopkins and especially for our Department of Physics and Astronomy. That was the day Adam Riess, who holds a Krieger-Eisenhower Professorship in our department, was named a Nobel Prize winner for his leadership in the High-z Team’s 1998 co-discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to an unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe.
This level of achievement on the part of one of our faculty members is an affirmation of the intense quest for knowledge that is under way in our department every day. I believe that every physics and astronomy graduate has played some part in advancing the scholarship of this field. Each of you has a connection—be it past or present—to our department, and I know you share our pride in Adam’s great accomplishment.
Even as we take time to celebrate this achievement (and celebrate we did!), the Department of Physics and Astronomy continues to move forward—sowing the seeds for the next round of discoveries in our disciplines. The department has recently embarked on a variety of new ventures, from a partnership with the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures at Nanjing University, to forefront work at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, to building a state-of-the-art telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and to numerous projects on the Homewood campus here in Baltimore.
No matter where they work, our diverse faculty and students share a commitment to deepening our understanding of the most basic, irreducible foundations of nature. I am fortunate to keep the company of so many scholars dedicated to forging new frontiers for our discipline.
In a similar vein, before you is another new venture for the department: an annual publication. Though it contains just a sampling of the work we have conducted over the past year, it will inform you of some of the department’s endeavors, and I hope it inspires you to remain in contact. Enjoy this inaugural issue.
Best,
Daniel Reich, Chair
The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
