Minimum Bias

Posted on 22/03/2010 by Jon Butterworth

[29/3/2010 An article based on this, benefiting from Ian Sample’s excellent editorial help, went on the Guardian site. See also Chapter 2.2 of Smashing Physics.]

As of Friday morning, the LHC is accelerating protons to an energy three-and-a-half times higher than the previous record. Within a couple of weeks we expect a steady stream of head-on proton-proton collisions at this energy, allowing us to search for new particles, forces and dimensions in completely new territory.

The LHC really became a collider just before Christmas. The collisions recorded back then were not at particularly high energy, but three experiments have now published results; my experiment, ATLAS, being the latest, with the paper becoming available on Tuesday. Before  storming onward, it’s a good moment to see what these results actually tell us.

The detectors (ALICE, CMS, ATLAS in this case) are basically huge digital cameras designed to record what happens when protons smash together. The first thing you do with a new collider and detector is measure the particles produced in a typical collision.

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Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Dreamt of in your philosophy

Posted on 16/03/2010 by Jon Butterworth

I strive to retain respect for philosophy and philosophers, really I do. Some of my best friends are philosophers. I’d hate to dismiss a whole area of intellectual endeavour as a sterile playground for clever wasters creating and demolishing pointless academic fashions. But you can probably tell I’m struggling hard right at this moment. It is all Nicholas Maxwell‘s fault. His entry into the heated debate on climate science rained blow after blow on my patience. I will resist, and will not damn all philosophy.

My second tactic is usually to ignore it (“No I can’t prove that chair exists.  In fact it may not, because I can hear you talking out of your arse so clearly”). Life is too short. But in this case it got under my skin. This is partly because he picks on physics (hey! that’s me!) and partly because the climate debate Maxwell has stumbled ineptly into is real and important. And physicists have themselves stumbled fairly ineptly into this debate recently, as I discussed here.

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Posted in Climate Change, Philosophy, Science | Tagged | 13 Comments

Mountain Physics

Posted on 09/03/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Wahay! I finally posted the proceedings of the Les Houches Workshop on Physics at TeV colliders and they appeared on the arXiv today. ArXiv (pronounced archive) is the standard repository for particle physics papers and lots of of other science.

There are a lot of meetings called “Workshops”. None of them as far as I know contain lathes and CNC milling machines like a proper workshop should, but most of them don’t even qualify as somewhere where you do work (see this nice post for what conferences are often like). Les Houches is an honourable exception on the latter point.

It lasts for three weeks, split into two sessions. It is in a fantastic setting:

View from Les Houches

Morning view

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Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Rambling, Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Open Source Science

Posted on 06/03/2010 by Jon Butterworth

I have had enough brushes with eccentrics who think I am going to destroy the world with the Large Hadron Collider to appreciate that in scientific fields where many lives and dollars are genuinely at stake, pressures can be enormous and cool scientific discourse is hard to find and maintain. In such fields, pressures don’t just come from eccentrics and obsessives, but from smart and well-funded lobby groups. I have enormous respect and sympathy for those scientists who work in such areas, under intense commercial, political and moral pressures.

One such area is climate science. I’m writing this basically because the Institute of Physics, of which I am a Fellow, has waded in to the so-called “climate wars” recently; once with a statement before Copenhagen and more recently in “evidence” to the Science and Technology Committee.

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Posted in Climate Change, Politics, Science, Science Policy | Tagged | 6 Comments