God, Stephen Hawking and M-Theory

Posted on 03/09/2010 by Jon Butterworth

I speak my brain on Channel 4 News about the booksellers’ current favourite controversy – Stephen Hawking versus God

Yesterday, when I should have been writing a paper about data from the Atlas detector at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, I was taxied across Geneva to talk live on television to Jon Snow about Stephen Hawking’s apparent sudden conversion to atheism.

Physics World has the video here.

Talking about God is well out of my comfort zone but I thought I should agree to do it since I worry that manufactured religion vs science wars can be very damaging and I didn’t feel I should wimp out of trying to inject some sense.

In fact Jon Snow and Channel 4 News hosted what I think was a very reasonable discussion. Phew.

Oh, and by the way, Stephen Hawking hasn’t changed his mind about God.

(also at The Guardian although the video is broken)

PS “Speak My Brains”, hat-tip to the Day Today.

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Supersymmetry – the end of the line?

Posted on 01/09/2010 by Herbi Dreiner

Slightly expanded version of this post now available on The Guardian.

The conference on “Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions“, which my colleagues and I organised in Bonn, finished yesterday. The entire week I was thinking I would drop into bed and sleep for a full day. But oddly, I feel quite refreshed. It was great fun listening to the talks and discussing with so many friends and colleagues, despite all the organisational headaches. The conference dinner was on an elegant boat which in an earlier life was used for the signing ceremony of the Schengen agreement. (For us mainland Europeans this is a big deal.)

Supersymmetry seems alive and well and ready to face the challenge from the LHC. But what is supersymmetry? And what is so super about it? Why are we so taken with it, even though there is as yet no experimental evidence it actually exists? There are two main arguments, first it is a solution to the `hierarchy problem’. I will save this for a potential second post, if Jon invites me back. The other is indeed an aesthetic argument related to the `Coleman-Mandula theorem’.

Now, I tell myself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror, that aesthetics is for wimps, but it is all the same an interesting argument.

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Moving Home

Posted on 31/08/2010 by Jon Butterworth

The Guardian have decided to host “Life and Physics” on their site. I’m really pleased about it, since I guess it can only mean a wider readership. I am also flattered that professionals wish to associate their paper with my writing.

I don’t intend to change anything other than the hosting site. I’ll continue to maintain this site on wordpress, but most if not all posts will from now on only appear here as stubs, with the full post on the Guardian website.

Like this one.

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Notes from Chicago

Posted on 30/08/2010 by lilyasquith

Now at The Guardian.

I am Lily, a new postdoc at Argonne National Lab.  I’m the one who thinks she can find the Higgs boson by listening to it. Thanks Jon for letting me play on your blog.

It’s a walk in the park.

I moved here just over a week ago to work on ATLAS physics analysis.  So far the closest I have got to doing any physics is talking about ways to limit the shock a colleague gets from the carpet-humidity-doorknob setup in his office here. But that’s a start.

Argonne have excellent childcare facilities

I’m loving it here so far. It was a tricky one deciding whether to move 4000 miles from London with an 11-year-old child and no driving license. I’m glad we did.

Argonne is full of smart people doing interesting physics. My PhD was on the search for the Higgs boson, which is one of the few areas the people at Argonne aren’t actively involved in. I’m giving a seminar about my research in the next couple of weeks which will either draw them in or put them off for life, or most likely a mixture of the two.

I have done no physics whatsoever in the last week, so here is an edited summary of our experiences so far, to be filed under “non-physics”.

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