Firing a quark through the early universe

Posted on 27/11/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Latest results from the Large Hadron Collider use quarks and gluons to “X-ray” the nuclear soup we came from.

At The Guardian. See also Chapter 4.6 of Smashing Physics.

Posted in Physics, Science | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Firing a quark through the early universe

Five things I learnt when shadowing an MP

Posted on 26/11/2010 by Jon Butterworth

By Emily Nurse: On being a scientist paired with an MP, and what she learned from the experience.

At The Guardian.

Posted in Politics, Science Policy | Comments Off on Five things I learnt when shadowing an MP

Don’t wear your colours here..

Posted on 20/11/2010 by lilyasquith

riotsI’ve spent the last 48 hours enthralled by the goings on at the Argonne “Analysis Jamboree”. I’m not really much of a one for these things… my more senior colleagues doze and my more junior colleagues tap loudly on their laptops; facebooking, writing code, who knows. Sometimes I wonder what the senior ones dream about.. particularly in the weekly lunchtime seminars, where the average age of an attendee is about 2,609.

Continued on The Guardian.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Science | Tagged | Comments Off on Don’t wear your colours here..

On the way home

Posted on 20/11/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Distance, technology and stuff. Somewhere over Paris.

I’m writing this on an aeroplane between Geneva and London. This is my weekly commute since becoming a convener of the ATLAS Standard Model physics group. We use teleconferencing and our world wide web, but chats over coffees are still essential for proper coordination of what is now a huge production machine for scientific papers.

At the Guardian. See also Chapter 4.2 of Smashing Physics.

Posted in Physics Stories, Rambling, Travel | Tagged , , | Comments Off on On the way home