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Tag archives: particle physics
Particle-physics lab beneath a Mexican pyramid
The Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan.
By James Dacey in Mexico
Yesterday was day three of the Physics World Mexican adventure and it turned out to be a really exciting 24 hours. Matin Durrani and I visited Teotihuacan – the “City of the Gods”– located 30 miles north-east of Mexico City. We were there to witness some of the closing moments of a 15-year particle physics experiment designed to “see” inside the Sun Pyramid, the world’s third biggest pyramid by volume.
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The admiral of the string-theory wars, add-male-author-gate, the Einstein font and more…
Julie Peasley, creater of the Particle Zoo. (Courtesy: CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
Peter Woit is lauded by some for having the courage to speak the truth to the physics establishment, while others see him as an enemy of science. Woit writes the Not Even Wrong blog, which has the same title as a controversial book he once wrote about the merits of string theory. In an article in the latest issue of Nautilus, Bob Henderson profiles Woit and his three decades of doubt over various incarnations of the theory that culminated about 10 years ago in the “string wars”. Henderson’s article is called “The Admiral of the String Theory Wars” and provides a fascinating insight into how the rise of string theory caused Woit to switch from physics to mathematics and his relationships with string theorists – some of whom work in the same building as Woit at Columbia University.
Isaac Newton’s Good Friday, art meets physics and our favourite April Fool gags
Suiting up for the Moon – an artwork aptly titled “Mooooonwalk”. (Courtesy: APOD/ Robert Nemiroff/Michigan Technological University)
By Hamish Johnston and Tushna Commissariat
As it’s Good Friday today, it can only mean that this week’s Red Folder will include a selection of the best physics-related April Fool jokes from earlier this week. Fermilab’s daily e-bulletin Fermilab Today had an entire joke edition up in the morning – their lead story was probably our favourite as the lab announced its new breakfast cereal dubbed “Neutrin-Os”, but their new day spa sounds pretty good too. CERN went for the funny if slightly obvious Star Wars joke, confirming the existence of the Force, but a slightly more subtle joke came earlier in the week from CERN Bulletin, which ran a story about CERN’s computer-security department handing out prizes for best password – we are still not quite sure if they were joking or not! Astronomy Picture of the Day had a truly fantastic image (see above) of a Lunar Grazing Module described as a “multipurpose celestial bovine containment system”.
Particle-physics electronica
By Michael Banks
Fancy a bit of particle-physics electronica?
Then make sure you download the latest album from Isle of Wight electronic duo Cosmic Mind Warp.
In a “unique crossover” between the worlds of cosmology, quantum physics and electronic music, Alister Staniland and David Holmberg have just released a new concept album dubbed Subatomic Particles.
The 15-track album, which features songs such as “Large Hadron Collider”, “Quantum Tunnelling” and “Down Quark”, is described by the duo as a “hallucinogenic head-trip through the microscopic world of subatomic particles and the strangeness of quantum physics”.
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Last views of a huge particle detector before the Large Hadron Collider comes to life
My photo opportunity: this could be the last we will see of the CMS for three years.
By Tushna Commissariat at CERN
Regular readers of Physics World will know that I am currently visiting the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, ahead of the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the coming weeks. My first stop yesterday afternoon was a press conference in which CERN’s director-general Rolf Heuer and other leading physicists briefed us about “Run 2” and what researchers are hoping to discover. You can read about what they had to say here: “Large Hadron Collider fires up in a bid to overturn the Standard Model“.
I managed to squeeze in a quick last-minute visit to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector before it is sealed up tight for the next three years. My host was CMS communications officer Achintya Rao, who took me and a few others deep underground into the bowels of the CMS – and what a sight it was!
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Deflategate, DIY particle detection and an ode to Beagle 2
By Hamish Johnston
Loyal sports fans often need a reason for losing beyond “their team was better than ours”, and the latest blame-game in American football comes with a twist of physics to it. The run-up to this year’s Superbowl is no exception. Some disgruntled Indianapolis Colts fans claim that the New England Patriots had taken advantage of deflated footballs to make their decisive 45-7 victory on 18 January, which sends them to the championship game.
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Become a CERN physicist in your bedroom
By James Dacey
Particle collision within the ATLAS detector. (Courtesy: CERN/Higgs Hunters)
Who discovered the Higgs boson? Was it Peter Higgs and a combination of other great minds? The experimentalists at CERN who analysed reams of data? The magnificent machinery of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) itself? By the time that the next great breakthrough in particle physics comes along, the debate about who makes the discovery could become even more complex. That’s because a new citizen-science project is encouraging anyone with an Internet connection to search for new curiosities in the Higgs data.
“Higgs Hunters” launched this week and invites the public to sift through collision images from the LHC’s ATLAS detector. The task at hand is to look for the paths of charged particles that seem to appear out of thin air in what are known as off-centre vertices. As explained on the Higgs Hunters website, “some scientists think the Higgs could break apart into exotic particles entirely new to science”. On the Higgs Hunters website, citizen scientists help to count the number of particle tracks and can notify the science team if they spot anything out of the ordinary.
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Relive CERN’s highlights as the lab turns 60
By Matin Durrani
CERN has been celebrating its 60th anniversary all this month, but it was in fact six decades ago today – on Wednesday 29 September 1954 – that the lab’s convention was ratified by its first 12 member states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and Yugoslavia.
Physics World has played its own small part in marking the anniversary, including a careers feature on what skills you need as CERN director-general, a day-in-the-life blog written by current CERN boss Rolf-Dieter Heuer, and an appearance at the lab’s TEDx event last week by our columnist Robert P Crease.
This blog entry rounds off our coverage of CERN at 60 with a few links to classic material from our archives.
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A TEDx train wreck?
Calm before the storm – the view of CERN from Robert P Crease’s bedroom window as he tries desperately to shave a final two minutes off his TEDx talk.
By Robert P Crease in CERN, Geneva
On Sunday morning I arrived at CERN to find workers putting finishing touches on a huge tent where the lab will host its TEDx event on Wednesday, and its 60th anniversary festivities next week.
“TED”, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a non-profit organization that promotes talks on what it calls “ideas worth spreading”; the “x” denotes an independent event organized in that spirit. This is the second TEDxCERN – the first took place last year – and it’s hosted by Brian Cox. More than 1000 people will watch 14 speakers, three performances and three animations; tens of thousands more viewers are expected online.
James Gillies, CERN’s head of communication, invited me to be a speaker. The subject this year, he said, was how science could better engage with major social challenges. He said that my May Physics World column “Why don’t they listen?” – on why scientists have difficulty getting politicians’ ears – had “hit the nail on the head”, and asked if I’d be interested in discussing the idea.
A week at CERN? A great excuse to implore colleagues take over my classes? Sure! All I had to do, I thought, was talk my way through some extended version of the column.
A scientific pyramid scheme, symmetry through the ages, why physics students are “standing a little taller” and more
Pyramid power: this lovely object has nothing to do with postdocs. It is a simpler version of a much larger Sierpinski tree that can be found on London’s South Bank.
By Hamish Johnston
Just this week six people were convicted in Bristol of crimes related to running a pyramid scheme. This involves taking money from lots of new investors and giving it to a smaller number of investors who signed up earlier – until the pyramid collapses. Is the current model for training scientists a pyramid scheme of sorts? That is the claim in a piece on the US’s National Public Radio (NPR) website written by Richard Harris.
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