All being well, I’ll be in CERN tomorrow for the first time since the end of 2019. Given how routine this used to be, I am surprisingly nervous and excited (and less surprisingly resentful of the extra brexit-induced paperwork involved). The main reason is a Scientific Policy Committee meeting (where I am an observer on behalf of the UK delegation) followed by a trip to Grenoble to work with some collaborators and give a colloquium. Amongst those collaborators are Mohammad and Ingo, who I worked with on this paper. Mohammad was supposed to visit UCL as an MCnet student in 2020, but Covid intervened of course. This week I’m looking forward to meeting him in person for the first time. Another step towards business as previous/usual I guess.

After the LHC restart and the W mass kerfuffle last week (which will both obviously have longer-term consequences), here’s some cosmology. I am not a cosmologist, but then my cosmology friends comment on particle physics so I think this is allowed. Anyway, the article for BBC Focus is very big-picture-beginner-level stuff. If I can understand it, probably everyone else can too. Which is the goal, of course.

Update…