Jay Albert:

Air Force Research Lab / VSBX 29 Randolph Rd Hanscom AFB, MA 01731-3010 jay.albert@hanscom.af.mil I do research on the Earth's magnetosphere, also known as space weather. Some more buzz words: solar wind, Van Allen radiation belts, aurora borealis. For a serious explanation, there are some good web pages at Boston University, NASA, Rice University, and the University of Michigan. Also, take a look at spaceweather.com.

My web pages used to be at Boston College, where I worked for several years. That site is now gone, so out of sheer inertia I've copied most of it here: a collection of well-I-think-they're-funny clippings, a photo essay on living in Davis Square in Somerville MA, various travel photos, and my ever-popular, occasionally-growing publication list.

Here's a reprint of my paper from the ISEC meeting in Toulouse (September 2003), which is buried in the website of Space Weather: The International Journal of etc., etc.. You can look at the "official" pictures from that meeting, or my pictures from the AOGS meeting in Singapore in July 2004. (Yes, it was hot.)

In March 2005 I went to a workshop on radiation belt electrons in Hermanus, South Africa, of all places. I've made room for the photos by deleting reprints of some old publications, by popular request. Let me rephrase that ...

Hey! My paper on multidimensional diffusion (you know, including cross terms), is out in GRL (July 2005).

In October I gave an invited talk at the 2005 URSI "Grand Assembly" in New Delhi. I still haven't recovered from the trip, although I was out of town on Oct. 29, when 59 people were killed by bombs (apparently set by Kashmiri separatists). I put some travel pictures here.

"According to Tolstoy all our knowledge is necessarily empirical -- there is no other -- but it will never conduct us to true understanding, but only to an accumulation of arbitrarily abstracted bits and pieces of information; yet that seems to him (as much as to any metaphysician of the Idealist school which he despised) worthless beside, and unintelligible save in so far as it derives from and points to, this inexpressible but very palpable kind of superior understanding which alone is worth pursuing."
--Isaiah Berlin, in The Hedgehog and the Fox

"They [theoretical physicists] are a lot of fun, but you can't take them too seriously."
-- James Van Allen, in Physics Today, December 2004

"The Sun's rays travel perpendicular to the ionosphere, so although there is a lot of particle activity from the Sun, it is mostly absorbed and bent in to the shape of the Van Halen radiation belt. It's a good system, and produces some really beautiful natural artwork." [And some really questionable music.]
-- from a slashdot post