Amazing that so many phenomena that were expected to turn up at colliders, (if they were to turn up at all) eg Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, are being discovered in condensed matter systems.
Which makes some sense, I suppose. After all, spontaneous symmetry breaking, sometimes called the Higgs mechanism, was first observed in superconductors, and described by BCS.
As a physics PhD (experimental HEP) with excellent credentials who has been unemployed for a year, I suggest you consider doing work that is a) more practical and b) better-funded. FYI: I know of two other colleuages who are also unemployed for 6+ months, one who soon will be, and one who is selling sporting goods retail.
I'd love to encourage you to follow your dreams, but I've found that advanced degrees in physics don't mean much to non-physics employers.
Have you considered getting a job in Wall Street type finance? Like quant trading or something?
The prospect of finance may not seem appealing, but it pays the bills and a lot of it is pretty fascinating. The same why you studied a lot of the phenomena that make the physical world function, finance and economics can satisfy the same curiosity that physics did for you, since it often involves macro and micro laws of how the economy, firms and people function.
And if you eventually feel dirty for being part of that machinery, you can always leave after 1-3 years with more skills, more employable and with a greater understanding of how the world actually functions behind the scenes.
Even if you start at the bottom in the finance world, you'll still be making great money. You'll also find more of your physics and natural sciences cohorts among your new colleagues that you would expect, especially on the quant/analysis side of the industry (not on the trading side).
(FWIW I studied physics for 3 years before switching majors, ended up in finance after college and switched to software engineering and product management after leaving finance).
That's the hope. New result from the Tevatron just showed that this thing appears to decay to matter, too (not just gauge bosons) http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0512051. It is looking very Standard Model like. An outside hope is that it doesn't couple to leptons. The CMS Higgs to tau tau result hinted as much, but it is very preliminary, unconfirmed by ATLAS. Measuring Branching Ratios (the rates that the new particle decays to different final states) will be a test of how Standard Model-like this new particle is. Here is CMS' paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1207.7235
Windows since 3.1 (though I was never an every day user of Vista and 7), OS X pre-Lion, GNOME 2, KDE 3.
OS X has a better combination of desktop quality and application support, but if Unity could magically run OS X apps, I don't think I'd ever use or recommend anything else.
Do people distribute their non-free code, which then, somehow bootstraps GPL libraries (from GPL sources)? Would that be compatible with the GPL, or is there a provision against that?
Any project that builds using Maven does that all the time!
(And really it's not simply a question of "non-free" -- there are plenty of open source licenses that are incompatible with the GPL. Is this technically a workaround for the incompatibility between Apache v2 and GPL v2?)
But a non-free villain could bootstrap a build using Maven without even publishing their source at all -- just keep a Maven repository with their binary jars and and a pom.xml that specifies dependencies on a whole bunch of GPL libraries.
Is there a provision against it? I hope so, but I haven't found it yet.
Presumably, if proprietary code isn't linked with GPL code, it's not a derived work, but two separate works under different licenses. If your situation can tolerate it, you might could write a gplserver running in a separate address space. Or, if it's hardware to hide, video drivers frequently provide a razor-thin kernel driver that does little more than let you mmap the device's I/O space, with all the action sequestered in a proprietary userspace library.
You're still linking in the free software. If dynamically linking the normal way would be verboten, I can't see why dynamically linking that way would be any different.
Unofficial calculator of the Higgs boson 95% CL limit on the ratio of observed Higgs production cross section to the cross section predicted by the Standard Model, as well as other statistical quantities (eg P-value, etc). Based on recent experimental data (published, presented at conferences) concerning the Higgs boson from the Tevatron and the LHC experiments.
Which makes some sense, I suppose. After all, spontaneous symmetry breaking, sometimes called the Higgs mechanism, was first observed in superconductors, and described by BCS.