LHC Run 3, the beginning

Posted on 22/04/2022 by Jon Butterworth

Today will be a busy day at CERN, with beams scheduled to go around the Large Hadron Collider tunnel, a big step towards the start of “Run 3”. This comes after a long, three year shutdown where, while struggling with challenges from COVID and the invasion of one of our associate member states by a (now suspended) observer state, a series of upgrades and maintenance tasks have been carried out on the accelerator and the experiments.

You can read some articles about it, with nice quotes from colleagues, here and here for example. And for a while at least you can hear me talking about it with Rick Edwards and Rachel Burden on BBC 5 Live Breakfast (just before 7am).

There’ll be no new collisions today, they should come in June, with the new (slightly) higher energy collisions targetted for July. You can see the long-term schedule here, and we’re still in the orange. Green is where the physics really happens.

But the machine is alive again, and it’s good.

Continue reading →
Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Does sound make heat?

Posted on 23/08/2021 by Jon Butterworth

This is just a link to another of those quick physics answers I do sometimes for BBC Science Focus: Does sound make heat?

The previous one of these sort of connected with a conversation I had on twitter. I think this one probably connects with twitter in general, to be honest.

Posted in Physics, Science | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Does sound make heat?

Pi, and why we don’t melt

Posted on 20/08/2021 by Jon Butterworth

I got involved in a discussion the other day, initiated by the science writer Natalie Wolchover, about the geometry of the Earth and our intuitive understanding of it.

Continue reading →
Posted in Mathematics, Physics, Science, Travel, Writing | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Pi, and why we don’t melt

The relativity of age

Posted on 09/08/2021 by Jon Butterworth

Right, well the weekend was fun.

We went to Cambridge which, while only 48mins away on the train, felt like an adventure in these coronaviral times. The world has shrunk to a plague-stricken village, while at the same time growing to inaccessible dimensions.

The proximate cause of the adventure was a 50th birthday party (thanks Ben and Esther!). I don’t know how this happened, but people who are younger than me are now achieving their half century. Even my little brother made it earlier in the year.

At the party I felt much younger than my calendar age. The morning after, I felt somewhat older, and probably looked it while doing the Cosmic Shambles thing from our hotel room. We discussed amongst other things, Steven Weinberg’s contributions to the foundation of the Standard Model. He did this the year I was born – roughly fifty years ago. Or, as they seem to be calling this these days “nearly fifty-five”. Dammit.

All of this segues nicely into another BBC Science Focus answer I wrote, to the question What day of the week did the Big Bang happen?

See, even the universe is vague on this kind of thing.

Posted in Astrophysics, Rambling, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The relativity of age