Babbage @TheEconomist

Posted on 25/05/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Along with several colleagues, I was interviewed by my old Guardian Science Blog boss Alok Jha for two episodes of the Economist’s Babbage podcast, about the future of the LHC and beyond. If you subscribe to the Economist you can find it here, and it’s on various other podcast platforms.

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Astrotech and Cake

Posted on 22/05/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Last week included a trip to Edinburgh for STFC Council*. I arrived early (I recommend the night train, at least if you are within easy reach of Euston) and walked through Edinburgh in the mist to the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, which is nearly at the top of Blackford Hill to the south of the city centre. I’m not sure why it isn’t at the top of the hill, really. It is at the Royal Observatory, and in my experience astronomers always get themselves as high as possible.

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Is pink a real colour?

Posted on 14/05/2022 by Jon Butterworth

This is an important physics question, on which I gave an opinion in BBC Science Focus.

This week, after the fun travels of the previous week, I have mostly been marking Mathematical Methods III exams. I don’t really have anything to say about that so here’s a picture of Zorro having his breakfast.

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Guardian Science Weekly Podcast

Posted on 08/05/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Along Guardian Science correspondent Hannah Devlin, I discussed the flavour anomalies from LHCb with Madeleine Finlay for the Guardian Science Weekly podcast.

It is titled “Will the Large Hadron Collider find a new fifth force of nature?“. Hannah gives a nice introduction to the Standard Model and its limitations, and then we go into how the evidence for new physical phenomena are actually probed at the LHC.

The discussion moves to the more general topic of exploration at the LHC with all the experiments and with direct studies, although it may sound a bit as though I’m working on LHCb, which I am not, I’m sticking with ATLAS and these kind of differential cross section measurements, which will throw some light on possible explanations for the lepton flavour physics, of course.

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