Dean Burnett reblog

Posted on 10/03/2023 by Jon Butterworth

I am just going to leave this here because it’s better than anything I could write right now.

Why Does the Conservative Government Hate Footballers? – Dean Burnett
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Composite Dark Matter, for example

Posted on 01/02/2023 by Jon Butterworth

Yesterday I had a brief chat with Faculti about a paper I wrote with some collaborators last year.

In the paper, we were looking at what collider data (specifically from the Large Hadron Collider) could tell us about a relatively-little-studied class of Dark Matter models. But the chat itself turned into a sort of mini-manifesto about how I think we should be doing physics with the data we will take at CERN over the next few years.

Here’s a link to the video.

I hope its understandable and convincing, even if (and that’s the point really) you aren’t particularly interested in these particular models. (Although I don’t see why you wouldn’t be.)

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Life in a Sofa

Posted on 12/11/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Last night, while I was out talking about particle physics in Croydon, my useless family lost the TV remote. Having excluded all the other possibilities, this morning I came to the conclusion there was no option but to subject the sofa to radical surgery.

A few careful slashes with a stanley knife later, here’s the result.

For posterity, here (excluding a very strict definition of actual rubbish) is the inventory…

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See-saws, recycling and the W mass

Posted on 26/10/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Earlier this year the CDF collaboration published a measurement of the mass of the W boson which caused something of a stir. I even made it the topic of my slot at the rescheduled “Nine lessons for Curious People” in April. The interest arose principally because the measurement did not agree with the Standard Model of particle physics. It still doesn’t.

The Standard Model is very good as far as it goes, but it leaves important questions unanswered, so we are always on the lookout for a bigger, better theory with even more explanatory power. A very important method of “being on the look out” is to make precise measurements of things which the Standard Model predicts, and see if the predictions are right.

If they aren’t, that should be a big clue to the sought-after better theory.

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