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Tag archives: CERN
Comedy at CERN, physics in a Buridanian universe and separating sugar from sand
Curtain call at CERN: last year’s comedy show was a great success. (Courtesy: Comedy Collider)
By Hamish Johnston
“Bad Boy of Science” Sam Gregson and colleagues are organizing an evening of physics-related comedy at CERN in Geneva on Friday 13 June. “LHComedy: No Cause for ConCERN” will kick off in the CERN Globe at 19:30 and is billed as “a fantastic and innovative new way of presenting the work going on at CERN and engaging with the public”. The line-up from CERN includes Canadian PhD student Nazim “License to Thrill” Hussain, quantum diarist Aidan “The Mole” Randle-Conde and Cat “Schrödinger” Demetriades. You can watch last year’s comedy extravaganza from CERN here. Others involved in the project are Clara Nellis, Alex Brown, Hugo Day, Claire Lee and Rob Knoops.
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Seven lessons from Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll in full flow at the 2014 Cheltenham Science Festival.
By Matin Durrani in Cheltenham
I made the short journey yesterday from Bristol to the regency spa town of Cheltenham, which this week is hosting its annual science festival. One of the largest such events in the UK, it’s been running since 2002 and has a packed programme of A-list speakers and topics ranging from genetics to geology, from cocktails to cake, and from the human brain to the Higgs boson.
My main reason for attending the festival, though, was to meet Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, whose book about the search for the Higgs boson (called The Particle at the End of the Universe ) was picked by Physics World last year as one of our top 10 books of 2013. Carroll was in the Gloucestershire town to give a one-hour talk about the Higgs, although the festival organizers were clearly working him hard as he also spoke in separate lectures on dark matter and dark energy, and on his role as a science adviser to Hollywood. (Carroll’s worked on films including Thor, Avengers Assemble and TRON: Legacy and even played a tiny role on TV’s The Big Bang Theory – stay tuned for more on that in our upcoming audio interview with him.)
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CERN gets set for LHC restart
Taking it lying down: an engineer working on the CMS detector at CERN.
By Michael Bishop in CERN, Geneva
As CERN ramps up its preparations for “Run 2” of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the start of 2015, many are wondering where the next big discovery will come from and whether it will emulate the success, and popularity, of the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
There appears to be no hangover from that landmark event and a genuine excitement among the scientists at CERN, which I witnessed first-hand earlier this week during a two-day tour of CERN’s facilities organized by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Many of the UK-based scientists that I spoke to during the tour showed a remarkable enthusiasm for the experiments they were working on and confessed to expecting similar, if not bigger, discoveries when the particle collider starts smashing protons together at higher energies.
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CERN creates new office for medical research
Steve Myers (far left) and colleagues at the LEIR facility.
By Hamish Johnston
Earlier this month my colleague Tami Freeman was at CERN where she had a tour of what will soon be the Geneva-based lab’s first major facility for biomedical research. Called BioLEIR, the facility is now being created by modifying the existing Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR).
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Intelligent life on a doughnut, how cats and skiers spin, a marriage made at CERN and more
By Hamish Johnston
There’s definitely an educational vibe to this week’s picks from the Red Folder, which begins with Tanner Higgin’s selection of “Five apps that test your physics skills“. Writing on Mind/Shift, a website based in California and dedicated to learning, Higgin highlights Crayon Physics Deluxe, which allows users to draw physical objects and then let gravity and other physical effects take over. Also featured is Amazing Alex, which allows users to combine more than 30 different household objects to create fantastical Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg contraptions.
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Join CERN’s scavenger hunt
Can you spot all 20 or so LEGO figurines in the CERN computing centre?
By Michael Banks
You may remember that late last year CERN teamed up with Google Street View to allow users to go on a virtual tour of the lab, including 12 km of the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel plus the caverns that house the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE experiments.
This involved Google‘s Zurich team spending two weeks at CERN in 2011 photographing the LHC using a “Street View Trike” – a specially created camera-mounted bike.
Well, what we didn’t known then was that Stefan Lüders, CERN’s computer security officer, had decided to stash about 20 LEGO figurines around the CERN computing centre before the cameras rolled.
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Physics World 2013 Focus on Big Science is out now
By Michael Banks
Physics World Focus on Big Science.
All eyes will be on Stockholm next week as the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics is announced. One of the frontrunners for the prize in the minds of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will surely be the discovery last year of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
But the LHC story is far from over and in the latest Physics World focus issue on “big science” find out how the LHC will hunt for new particles beyond the Higgs boson once the collider restarts in 2015 following an 18-month repair and upgrade programme at the Geneva-based lab.
All full members of the Institute of Physics will receive a print edition of the focus issue along with their copy of the October issue of Physics World, but everyone can access a free digital edition. The focus issue also looks at how particle physicists are already thinking about what could come after the LHC, with bold plans for a 80–100 km proton–proton collider. There are even plans for a collider based on lasers, with an international team looking at creating an array of “fibre lasers” to be used as a future “Higgs factory”.
Days out at CERN, serendipitous songs, shaken scientists and more
By Tushna Commissariat
A peek into the Red Folder this week brings up the CERN Open Days – the biggest particle-physics laboratory in the world will allow people from all over the globe to roam its hallowed halls freely for this weekend. While the most exciting part of the event will undoubtedly be visits into the underground caverns that host the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments, a whole host of other activities for researchers, science enthusiasts and children are available. Also this weekend, as a part of the European Researcher’s Night festivities, CERN will be hosting events in Paris, Geneva and Bologna for their Origins 2013 event that looks at two big scientific discovers made in the past two years: the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN and the latest Planck mission data. For those of you attending, “Speed-dating – close encounters with researchers” definitely caught our eye. Those of us not fortunate enough to be in any of those places can watch many of the festivities via a live webcast. And lastly, you can explore CERN from the inside on Google Maps with Street View.
Looking beyond the Standard Model in Liverpool
Liverpool physicist John Fry (right) gets ready for his close-up.
By Hamish Johnston
Earlier this week the Physics World film crew was on Merseyside to document some of the exciting physics done in Liverpool and its environs. Our first stop was a meeting of the NA62 collaboration at the University of Liverpool that was organized by the particle physicist John Fry (above right with our cameraman David Hart).
The finishing touches are currently being put on the NA62 experiment, which will start up at CERN in Geneva next year. The international collaboration running the experiment will focus on making precise measurements of the decay of a charged kaon to a pion and two neutrinos. If all goes to plan, NA62 could find that the decay is not completely described by the Standard Model of particle physics, which could point towards new and exciting physics.
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Boom boom! CERN hosts first ever comedy night
By Matin Durrani
Laugh out loud – CERN’s first ever stand-up comedy show. (Click to view details)
Being funny is hard.
(“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”)
Being funny about physics is even harder.
(“So what’s new?”
“Oh you know: E over h.”)
And being funny about physics at CERN’s first ever official stand-up comedy night is likely to be trickier still.
So good luck is what I say to those involved in the LHComedy event, which takes place on Friday 30 August from 7.30 to 11.30 p.m. (Central European Time) at CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation in Geneva.
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