It’s the Future, Stupid*

Posted on 28/03/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Today there is a letter in the Mail on Sunday from a bunch of astronomers and particle physicists backing up Suzanne Moore‘s piece last week. Her article was great (even if the juxtaposition of Carla Bruni’s rear and the now infamous Telegraph typo in my twitter stream was slightly disturbing) and the comments on it seem to show that Mail readers get the point of science better than many politicians. It’s all part of what is now a very public discussion about the importance of science, innovation and technology for future of the UK (in the context of our coming election) and indeed the world.

The MoS piece and letter bracketed a busy week which for me included the launch of the new UK Space Agency on Tuesday, a meeting of STFC’s “Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear” (PPAN) Science Committee” on Wednesday and Thursday, a school governor’s meeting, then a rapid zoom to CERN and back to give a talk at an ATLAS meeting.

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Posted in Particle Physics, Politics, Science, Science Policy | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

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