Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • Talking About LHC Safety

    In the latest Science Saturday at Bloggingheads, Jennifer and I zip from the breathtakingly topical — the Large Hadron Collider, what it’s good for, and why you shouldn’t be scared of it — to the profoundly eternal — calculus, and why people are scared of it.

    I’ve finally settled on a proper response to questions about whether the LHC will destroy the world. (After the initial response, I mean.) It comes in two parts.

    Part One: To an inquisitive person who is asking in good faith, who has heard a bit about disaster scenarios involving black holes swallowing the Earth, and wants to know why we’re so sanguine about the possibility of global cataclysm. Sure, we can explain that it’s really unlikely you would even make a black hole, and even if you do, that all of physics as we understand it predicts that such a black hole would evaporate away, and that this has been carefully studied.

    But the better, and punchier, response is simply: there’s nothing the LHC will do that the Universe hasn’t previously done many times over. This is, of course, the conclusion of the recent paper by Giddings and Mangano. It’s long been understood that the energies attained by high-energy cosmic rays are vastly larger than those created by the LHC; the collisions at CERN aren’t the most energetic in the universe, they’re just the most energetic ones created by human beings, that’s all. But the alarmist brigade, desperate for continued relevance, came up with a loophole: what if black holes are created, but ones from cosmic rays simply escape the Earth’s gravity, while those created at the LHC sit around and eat us up? What G&M show is that, even if that were possible, cosmic rays bumping into to white dwarfs and neutron stars would have created black holes that did get stuck, and would have eaten them up. But the fact is, we see plenty of white dwarfs and neutron stars in the sky; so that’s not a danger. It has nothing to do with any arrogant presumption that we understand physics at high energies, or the evolution of microscopic black holes; it’s simply that there is no scenario in which such black holes are created without having other observable effects. (See a nice write-up of this by Michael Peskin in the new APS online review magazine, entitled simply Physics.)

    Part Two: Experience reveals that, even if you carefully explain why there is no allowed scenario in which black holes swallow the Earth, some stubborn folks will still say “But you can never be perfectly sure! So why take the risk?” For them, it makes sense to switch from science and turn to an analogy. (Experience also reveals that people would rather nitpick at the ways in which the analogy is imprecise, rather than addressing its point; but we soldier on.)

    So imagine that you go home to cook dinner — you boil some water, drop in some pasta, and pull a jar of tomato sauce from the fridge. But wait! Are you sure you want to open that jar? After all, if you ask any hyper-careful science-type of person, they will tell you that they can’t be absolutely sure that this innocent-looking sauce doesn’t actually host a virulent mutated pathogen. It’s possible — not very likely, but possible — that when you open that jar, a deadly virus will kill you dead, and proceed to eliminate all human life over the course of the next two weeks.

    What is the chance of this happening? Very, very small. But not strictly, absolutely zero. And, we must admit, the consequences of being wrong are very bad indeed. And frankly, how much enjoyment are you going to get from that jar of tomato sauce, anyway? The only logical and moral choice would be to forgo the sauce entirely, and just enjoy your pasta plain.

    Except this is nuts, of course. Even if the consequences of an action would be truly cataclysmic, sometimes the chances of it happening are so low that we have to take the risk. Or, more accurately, we choose to take the risk, because science never proves anything beyond any possible doubt, and we can’t help but take such improbable risks all the time. Maybe there is a fleet of invisible alien spaceships hovering over head, testing our commitment to unlocking the secrets of the universe, and they will destroy the Earth with their alien death-lasers if we don’t turn on the LHC. There’s a chance!

    And that’s a chance I don’t want to take.

  • I Guess This Election Really Is About Change

    Occasionally we arrogant fundamentalist atheists are accused of picking on a simplistic, straw-man picture of God — some old man in the sky, Who meddles clumsily in our earthly affairs — rather than a more philosophically sophisticated view of the divine. Just to remind everyone, the unsophisticated version is alive and well, and has big plans for our upcoming elections. Here is an email being passed around among evangelicals. (Via.)

    Dear friends:

    Barack Hussein Obama has taken the nation by storm. From obscurity, with zero executive experience, or much of any kind, he has vaulted into the position of Presidential frontrunner. It is stunning. On the surface, it appears attributable only to his eloquent oratory and his race. But an invisible factor may be a strong spiritual force behind him, causing some people to actually swoon in his presence.

    I have been very concerned that he has publicly said that he does not believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. This makes both the Bible and Jesus a liar, and it means that Christ has died in vain. A person cannot be a true Christian who believes that there are other ways of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life with God. Only Jesus has paid the price for that.

    Therefore, there is, indeed, another spirit involved. And this spirit has come into our national life like a flood. Last week at Obama’s acceptance speech, that spirit exalted itself in front of a Greek temple-like stage, and to a huge audience like in a Roman arena. Omama was portrayed as god-like. His voice thundered as a god’s voice.

    At the end, Democratic sympathizer Pastor Joel Hunter gave the benediction and shockingly invited everyone to close the prayer to their own (false) gods. This was surely an abomination, but it was compatible with Obama’s expressed theology, and Hunter’s leftist leanings.

    God was not pleased.

    And God says, “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19).

    Enter Governor Sarah Palin. With incredible timing, the very next day, Sarah Palin also appeared out of nowhere. Her shocking selection as John McCain’s running mate stunned the world and suddenly took all the wind out of Obama’s sails.

    We quickly learned that Sarah is a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, attends church, and has been a ministry worker.

    Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing. You can tell by how the dogs are already viciously attacking her. But they will not be successful. She knows the One she serves and will not be intimidated.

    Back in the 1980s, I sensed that Israel’s little-known Benjamin Netanyahu was chosen by God for an important end-time role. I still believe that. I now have that same sense about Sarah Palin.

    Today I did some checking and discovered that both her first and last names are biblical words, one in Hebrew the other in Greek:

    Sarah. Wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. In Hebrew, Sarah means “noble woman” (Strong’s 8283).

    Palin. In Greek, the word means “renewal.” (Strong’s 3825).

    A friend said he believes that Sarah Palin is a Deborah. Of Deborah, Smith’s Bible Dictionary says, “A prophetess who judged Israel…. She was not so much a judge as one gifted with prophetic command…. and by virtue of her inspiration ‘a mother in Israel.’”

    Only God knows the future and how she may be used by Him, but may this noble woman serve to bring renewal in the land, and inspiration.

    Jim

    The author, Jim Bramlett, was formerly an associate of Pat Robertson, and more recently has been kept busy recording angels singing.

    (The BSD Daemon didn’t appear in the original email; that was my addition.)

  • Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page?

    It’s September, and a young person’s fancy naturally turns to applying to grad school/postdocs/faculty jobs. And in this day and age, questions inevitably arise: Are they going to google me? What will they find? Followed immediately by: Should I have my own web page (if I don’t already)? And what should be on it?

    Roughly speaking, as you climb up the academic ladder, the scrutiny one undergoes becomes increasingly close. If you are in high school and applying to colleges, I would be extremely surprised if any admissions committee googled you — there are just too many of you, frankly. Mostly this also holds for undergrads applying to grad school. At least, that’s the situation among theorists; for experimentalists, who might be joining a specific lab on day one, the number might be smaller and the individual attention correspondingly greater. By the time you apply for faculty jobs, the numbers are very small, and nobody gets an offer without being poked and prodded in person, and having their CV examined under a microscope. In that case, the web page is (almost) beside the point, as they’ve seen you up close and personal.

    It’s for postdoc applications, then, that the googling question becomes most relevant. Remember that most research groups have relatively few postdocs, so they take the selection process very seriously — mistakes can be costly. But in many cases the decision-making timescale is sufficiently short that they don’t have the luxury of seeing each candidate in person. So I would say: yes, at many places where you apply for postdocs, they will be googling you to glean information that might not show up on a formal application. That is especially true if you’re applying to individual professors or groups (rather than wider-ranging fellowships), and also if the relevant decision-makers are younger.

    So: if they do google you, what will they find? You can see how it might make sense to put up your own web page: that way you have some influence over their first impressions of you. There is a systematic issue, of course, that some names are more easily googleable than others, but we won’t address that here. If you do have a web page, you can simply include the URL in your CV, so they will have it in front of them.

    If you do decide to have a web page, what should it look like? There is an overarching principle at work here: the Web is World-Wide. That is, everything you put on your page can be viewed (ordinarily) by everyone. You can’t put stuff up that “is only meant for your friends,” and then be surprised when it is examined by prospective employers. If you have pictures or stories that are in any way private — keep them private!

    (more…)

  • Epsilon Away from Wipeout

    Everything I know about the global financial system comes from cartoon stick figures. Still, this doesn’t sound good. (Via, via.)

    Nouriel Roubini | Sep 13, 2008

    It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

    The Fed doesn’t want to simply bail out Lehman Brothers, as they did Bear Stearns, for a bunch of reasons — including, it appears, that it doesn’t set a good precedent to keep failing out banks that take crazy risks and then fail. Also because Lehman is in worse shape than Bear — insolvent, not just illiquid.

    So will anyone step in and save Lehman? Signs point to no.

    Unable to find a savior, the troubled investment bank Lehman Brothers appeared headed toward liquidation on Sunday, in what would be one of the biggest failures in Wall Street history.

    Should we be surprised to learn that many of Lehman’s problems stem from worthless mortgage-related assets, known colorfully as “toxic waste”? Probably not.

    Lehman put itself on the block earlier last week. Bad bets on real-estate holdings — which have factored into bank failures and caused other financial companies to founder — have thrust the firm in peril. It has been dogged by growing doubts about whether other financial institutions would continue to do business with it.

    Everything is connected, which is why we can’t just let bad banks fail and to hell with them. My cartoon-based knowledge of the economy doesn’t accurately predict what will happen if banks start falling like dominoes, but it can’t be good, right?

  • David Foster Wallace

    David Foster Wallace died last night. He was found at home by his wife — apparently he hanged himself. It’s a terrible tragedy for American literature.

    Wallace’s big, famous book was of course Infinite Jest, but among his other words was a quirky history of the concept of infinity, Everything and More. Like everything he wrote, it was sprawling and inventive and chock full of discursive footnotes. One such footnote now seems especially poignant:

    In modern medical terms, it’s fairly clear that G. F. L. P. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time when nobody knew what this was, and that his polar cycles were aggravated by professional stresses and disappointments, of which Cantor had more than his share. Of course, this makes for less interesting flap copy than Genius Driven Mad By Attempts To Grapple With ∞. The truth, though, is that Cantor’s work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there’s no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy’s life. The real irony is that the view of ∞ as some forbidden zone or road to insanity — which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years — is precisely what Cantor’s own work overturned. Saying that ∞ drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George’s loss to the dragon; it’s not only wrong but insulting.

  • Friday Tunes: Squeeze

    Wednesday night we walked over to the Orpheum — a wonderful theater from the 1920’s, recently refurbished to its former glory — to catch a concert by Squeeze — one of my favorite bands from high school, who have recently been refurbished to something like their former glory. Which is to say, they put on a great show of classic tunes played with crowd-pleasing gusto. And we had the unexpected pleasure of being recognized by CV reader David and his wife (Sarah? I didn’t catch her name, sorry). Scientists are kind of a big deal in this town.

    So here is Up the Junction.

    Note how the lyrics play with the notion of chronology. The temporal point of view shifts gradually throughout the narrative.

    This morning at 4:50
    I took her rather nifty
    Down to an incubator
    Where thirty minutes later
    She gave birth to a daughter
    Within a year a walker
    She looked just like her mother
    If there could be another

    Sadly, I couldn’t find a decent video of Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken.

  • Live-Blogging the LHC Startup!

    9:20 am Pacific Time: Let’s be clear. Tonight’s start-up is a symbolic event, not a physics event; as I understand it, the beam will only be circulating in one direction, so there won’t even be any collisions. Still, it’s a very important symbolic event! The first time the beam goes through the entire machine. So, just for fun, here will be a running commentary throughout the day, with links and musings and all that makes the blogosphere special. Co-bloggers are welcome to chime in, and any particle physicists out there who want to say something about the LHC are welcome to comment or email.

    9:45 am (Pacific), Sean: Feel free, in the comments, to make predictions about what the LHC will discover (ultimately, not today). Here are mine. Crackpots not welcome. And seriously, folks — black-hole/world-ending jokes are only funny the first million times.

    1:14pm (EST), Mark: Here at Cornell there’s going to be a public forum this evening with refreshments, chats with physicists, two talks (by Yuval Grossman and Peter Wittich) and with various instruments and components of the detector on display.

    10:26am (PDT), JoAnne: Actually, it is the end of the world as we know it. I will never again have to write a paper detailing the signatures of some crazy new Terrascale theory, wondering if there is any chance of connection to reality. I will never again have to plot a cross section as a function of the Higgs mass. In fact, I will never again have to do a loop over the Higgs mass in a code. I will never again wonder how electroweak symmetry is broken, how the hierarchy between the electroweak and gravity fundamental scales is maintained, whether there is a WIMP dark matter particle, or whether supersymmetry or extra spatial dimensions actually exist. Fundamental questions and roadblocks that have plagued us for literally decades will finally be answered and we will at last be able to move forward instead of spinning our wheels. Yes, indeed, the world will be truly different.

    10:47am (Pacific), Sean: Of course we are not the only blog covering this. The US/LHC Blogs have lots of information, and Tommaso Dorigo offers some inside scoop. There is also main CERN page for the event, and one for press releases.

    12:02pm (Pacific), Sean: The real excitement of the LHC startup is, of course, that it’s an excuse to party. Mike in comments already mentioned the Fermilab pajama party. Here at Caltech, where it’s not quite so ridiculously late at night, we’re having pizza and beer. And (for the wimps who can’t stay up), a lunch BBQ tomorrow. Everyone should feel free to put together their own party! Suggested soundtrack. (Dammit, I’m violating my own rules.)

    12:54pm (Pacific), Sean: I’ve asked some experts to chime in. Here is Gordy Kane, University of Michigan:

    The Standard Model(s) of particle physics and cosmology are wonderful established descriptions of the world we see. They leave out a lot we would like to understand, from dark matter and the matter asymmetry of the universe, to WHY the forces and particles (quarks and leptons) are what they are. LHC won’t tell us much more about the world we see and how it is made, but the discoveries there will point the way to “WHY”. It’s a WHY machine.

    The discovery that makes sense is supersymmetry, i.e. the superpartners of some of the Standard Model particles. There’s a lot of indirect phenomenological evidence that indeed some superpartners will be seen at LHC, such as the unification of the forces at very short distances, the absence of large new effects at the LEP and Tevatron colliders, and the very good indirect evidence for a light Higgs boson. A supersymmetric world is also one where we can understand how the electroweak symmetry is broken and how the matter asymmetry arises, and it has a dark matter candidate. I estimate ten or twenty gluinos and a lot of Higgs bosons will be produced in October this year (but not seen unless we are very lucky about the decay signatures). IF the LHC indeed establishes the world is supersymmetric, there is a great bonus – we can write string theories at the Planck scale where the laws of nature should be written and calculate predictions for LHC experiments and dark matter from them, and we can extrapolate data from LHC and dark matter experiments to the Planck scale to see what theories are suggested. Without that window we might never learn the underlying theory from which everything emerges.

    It’s very lucky that our technologies and our society allowed us to afford and to build the LHC to study nature so deeply (another anthropic idea?). It’s very unlikely (because of technological and financial and cultural limits) that we can ever have a further facility to extend this study, so we’re very lucky that a framework like string theory has emerged, one that addresses all the basic questions, at the same time we may be able to get from LHC the data that can test and establish it.

    1:24 pm (PDT), JoAnne: The History Channel (US cable TV) is airing
    The Next Big Bang at 8 PM this evening. The show details our expectations for the LHC and features David E. Kaplan of Johns Hopkins as well as many other of your favorite physicists, so don’t forget to tune in!

    1:58pm (Pacific), Sean: Ph.D. Comics weighs in.

    6:53pm (EST), Mark: BBC World News America, starting in a few minutes on the East coast, and repeated later, will have a piece on the LHC.

    4:05pm (Pacific), Sean: Prize for the best paper title goes to Mihoko Nojiri, arXiv:0809.1209.

    The Night before the LHC
    Authors: Mihoko M. Nojiri

    Abstract: I review recent developments on the use of mT2 variables for SUSY parameter study, which might be useful for the data analysis in the early stage of the LHC experiments. I also review some of recent interesting studies. Talk in SUSY08.

    4:25pm (Pacific), Sean: There will be a live webcast from CERN beginning at 11pm Pacific, with the actual beam scheduled for half an hour later. But right now you can click the link, and listen to a pre-packaged CERN video. You can also watch the startup on EVO, if you know what that means (or care to learn).

    4:50 pm (PDT), JoAnne: Yours truly has just been recruited for a 5 minute live radio interview on KCSB (the station is on the UC Santa Barbara campus) at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I guess David Gross has the good sense to be asleep at that hour! In any case, I’ll be sure to drink some coffee first, lest I spew some gibberish on blackholes.

    6:55pm (Pacific), Sean: Sorry, the “live” blogging took a hiatus while I was talking to Hal Eisner, a TV reporter (“extraordinaire,” he asks me to add) from the local Fox affiliate. He, quite rightly, was hectoring me mercilessly in an attempt to explain the purpose of the LHC at a level accessible to six-year-olds. (He also tried very hard to get me to say “God particle,” which I mostly resisted.)

    What is the purpose? It’s to discover the laws of nature, of course, or at least extend our knowledge of them. But that doesn’t always quite cut it for people. I think it would suffice to the aformentioned six-year-old; kids are naturally curious, but adults have it beaten out of them by a relentlessly pragmatic world. Among other things, the LHC represents a tremendous triumph of the basic inquisitiveness of the human species.

    7:20 pm (PDT), JoAnne: There’s a host of First Beam Day activities planned for tomorrow across the US. Check the listings for an event near you. Here in SF Bay area, swissnex, the annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, is throwing a party tomorrow night in coordination with SLAC and LBNL. Much fun will be had by all!

    7:53pm (Pacific), Sean: If you’re wondering whether the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world yet, see here.

    If you’re wondering whether physics is more or less tawdry than politics, see here.

    8:17pm (Pacific), Sean: The right response to end-of-the-world chatter is to change the subject — it’s just crackpottery, not a legitimate scientific debate. But damn, you have to be impressed with the vigor of the meme. Far and away the first thing that comes to mind when a person on the street hears “giant atom-smasher in Switzerland” is “might destroy the world.” How do we combat that? What is the one idea we would like to pop into people’s minds when they hear that phrase, and how do we get it there?

    11:52pm (EST), Mark: Gotta sleep, but will try to tune into BBC Radio 4’s Big Bang Day when I wake up!

    9:26pm (Pacific), Sean: Reporting now from the High Energy Physics conference room here at Caltech. In an hour and a half we’ll open a live feed to our colleagues at CERN, who will be updating us on what happens. Of course, the best answer is simply “all systems nominal.” The only way a detector will actually see anything (as I understand it) is if the beam is not focused perfectly from the start, which is perfectly possible. If the beam is well-behaved, it will just zip through.

    But of course, there are many steps along the way, and “first protons circumnavigating the accelerator” is as good a “turn on” event as any. Folks in the know have assured me that CERN will not be hosting multiple “trust us, this is the real start” events — this is it.

    9:48 pm (PDT), JoAnne:
    From looking at our comments, it’s clear that some folks are still genuinely frightened by the LHC. This should not have happened. The LHC is one of the most exciting scientific journeys in our lifetimes! We should all watch it in wonder and be amazed at its discoveries.

    Many a thoughtful, carefully analyzed and written scientific treatise has appeared which thoroughly disproves the claim that the LHC will destroy the Earth. But these aren’t published or mentioned or taken seriously by the press…. (HELP – I’m sounding like a Republican!)

    So, let me present a different, non-scientific, but emotional argument. We physicists are human beings too. We have children, parents, siblings, friends, etc, that we care deeply about. We care about this planet and its future and the future of our families. There are literally thousands of physicists, worldwide, involved in the LHC. If there was a serious concern, the scientists themselves would have stepped forward.

    As for me, one of my best arguments is that my bottle of 1990 LaTour remains in my cellar. I’m going to pull it out when we achieve collisions at the next accelerator after the LHC! Oh – and the fact that I’ve just spent the last 8 months undergoing intensive, arduous treatment for cancer so that I too can have a future and be a part of the LHC.

    10:00 pm (PDT), John:

    B minus two hours. Oh yeah! We’ve waited a long time for this.

    11:03pm (Pacific), Sean: Action is heating up, although the pizza has yet to arrive. So I’m going to start paying attention to the “real world.” I’ll come back if any disasters occur.

    11:30 pm (PDT), John:

    Looks like CERN has stuck a PR video in place of the live webcast…not too surprising…maybe the site got hammered, or they have that up until it starts.

    The SPS is cycling nicely. That’s what they’ll use to inject the beam in 30 minutes.

    11:37 pm (PDT), JoAnne: This is the error message I’m getting:

    Due to a huge interest for this live video feed of the LHC First Beam day, you may not be able to see the live video stream and we apologise for this.
    Please try reloading the page, come back later, or check the other connection options available on this page.
    Many thanks for your interest in CERN and the LHC!

    The folks at CERN should have planned for heavy traffic – I’ve waited 25 years for this and I’m disappointed.

    11:48 pm (Pacific), Sean: Getting updates from CERN. No disasters, but there was apparently a tiny glitch with one of the collimating magnets, which has now been fixed.

    The current beams are low energy (450 GeV, lower than the Tevatron at Fermilab). They want to ramp up to 5,000 GeV (5 TeV) by the end of October — on October 21st, there is a get-together featuring heads of state, and they would love to have actual high-energy collisions by then.

    They will be circulating the beam in both directions — just not at the same time, at least today.

    The computing system involves about a hundred thousand processors — soon to be upgraded to a few hundred thousand. Data flies from CERN to Caltech at about 40 GB per second, which they also want to upgrade by a factor of ten.

    11:58 am (Pacific), Sean: The webcast is limited to 2000 connections! Who’s the rocket scientist behind that?

    Midnight (Pacific), Sean: First beam! Or so they say. (See below.)

    12:03 am (PDT), John:

    Woo hoo! Did it work?

    I think it actually starts in a few minutes. The press kit says

    9:00 Live satellite broadcast and webcast begin with an introduction from the commentators in the CERN Control Centre, an animation showing the passage of a beam through the LHC, and highlights of the LHC operators’ daily meeting where they lay out the procedure for getting the first beam circulating in the LHC.

    9:06 Coverage begins of the first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC. Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, will narrate the proceedings from the CERN Control Centre. Video of accelerator operators at work in the CCC will alternate with views of the LHC apparatus in its tunnel 100 meters underground.

    12:08 (Pacific), Sean: Well, there was a video countdown. No human being has actually confirmed yet…

    12:11 am (PDT), JoAnne: Only 2000 connections? No wonder nobody can get on! With all the hype they should have planned better than this….

    12:22am (Pacific), Sean: Robert Aymar, CERN Director General … is speaking in French. Translation: in a few minutes we will let the beam zip through the LHC, sector by sector. (They stick absorbers in the way of the beam at certain points, just to check things in each sector before letting it go.) Sounds like the whole thing will take some time.

    Liveblogging closer to the source from Adam Yurkewicz, and from David Harris.

    I can’t update our blog because too many people are trying to read it!

    12:33am (Pacific), Sean: First beam for real! We saw it! Not yet all the way around, as per previous update.

    12:36am (Pacific), Sean: BBC reporter: “Ooh! This is exciting!”

    12:38am (Pacific), Sean: Okay, I think the beam they had was … actually still in the injector, not the LHC. Because now there is really beam in the LHC! Still not all the way around.

    12:40am (Pacific), Sean: Carlo Rubbia seen wandering around the LHC control room.

    12:46am (Pacific), Sean: They removed another absorber, and now the beam has reached CMS! I think that’s 3 octants from the beginning.

    1:02am (Pacific), Sean: They’ve made it about half way around, and are preparing a beam dump. Sadly, our reserved time on the videoconference has run out, as has my stamina, so I’m heading home. They’re predicting that a full circle will be achieved in the next half-hour or hour.

    See you tomorrow!

    1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

    1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

    1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

    1:43 am (PDT), JoAnne: SkyNews has just interviewed folks in the control rooms for each of the 4 experiments. All of the detectors turned on without trouble and are excited to be getting beam halo and beam gas events. LHCb and ATLAS saw the muons from the beam dump!

    Now that the beam has safely travelled through the full accelerator, it’s time for some shut-eye.

    7:38 am (PDT), JoAnne: Turns out that the live radio interview was with KCBS here in the Bay Area (which makes much more sense than KCSB in Santa Barbara – our communications department got that wrong!) and just finished. They mainly asked questions about the operation of the accelerator, what comes next, etc. They did ask if the research was open and if all the results would be public or if some of it would be kept secret. And, yes, the subject of those pesky blackholes came up…

    9:34 am (Pacific), Sean: As commenters have noted, Google has caught the fever:

    But here is something better: the signal from ATLAS when beam first went through.

    Click for the full glory!

  • Guest Post: David E. Kaplan on the LHC on the History Channel

    You may have heard that there’s some sort of big science machine scheduled to turn on in Europe. Very soon, in fact: first (official) beam at the Large Hadron Collider is supposed to occur around 9:30 Central European Summer Time (3:30 a.m. Eastern, if I have done the math correctly) on Wednesday. Call it Tuesday night, for us West Coasters.

    The folks at the History Channel recognize the importance of the event, and they’ve recruited Friend of CV David E. Kaplan, a particle theorist at Johns Hopkins, to host a special show entitled the Next Big Bang. And we, of course, have recruited David to tell you a little about the show. (In the picture, David is the one wearing glasses.)

    (p.s. This LHC game is surprisingly educational. Via DILigence.)

    Update: Hey, I guess this is a preview? Well, not of the History Channel documentary in particular, but closely related (and see David struggling with a bad hair day). Via symmetry breaking.

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    Hello All. This post represents shameless advertising for a television program which I am hosting on the History Channel this week. The show is a one-hour program about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment outside of Geneva and will air the day before the first proton bunch circulates the entire 27 km ring (September 9th, 8pm/midnight EDT/PDT, 7pm/11pm CDT, 6pm/10pm MDT). The show will visually describe the complexity and scale of the experiment and some of the potential discoveries we hope to make (the Higgs particle, supersymmetry, dark matter, extra dimensions).

    For many reasons this is an amazing moment in the history of science (many which have probably been repeated on this blog before). [Indeed — ed.] There are roughly 75 countries with at least one institution (university or lab) which has contributed to the construction of this machine. The list includes strange bedfellows: India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran and the United States, Greece and Turkey, Russia and Georgia, all of western Europe, most of eastern Europe, some of northern Africa and south America, Japan, China, S. Korea, etc. This unlikely team has constructed the biggest single machine in the history of the planet after over 20 years since the first plans were laid. At 10,000 scientists, this project represents the modern day pyramids.

    What gets me though is that high-energy physics have not really seen a discovery that has directly shaken the standard model of particle physics for thirty years. The discovery of neutrino masses were a surprise, but fit nicely in the standard model if there is new physics at (unreachably) high energies. Dark matter was certainly a surprise, but could potentially only couple to us gravitationally, and again not uproot the standard model. The same can be said about dark energy to an even greater extreme. However, an unexpected particle has not been discovered since the seventies. The seventies were the time that not only the standard model was discovered experimentally, but its underpinnings, quantum field theory, was confirmed as the correct underlying description of all matter interactions (other than gravitational). The (perhaps, not so) amazing thing is, the surprising discoveries stopped by the end of the seventies, and we have been confirming the standard model even since.

    The implication is that almost the entire particle physics community, both theorists and experimentalists, who are actively working on LHC physics have never been involved in a surprising discovery. This large community of scientists have been building up to this moment for their entire careers. The scale of these experiments are such that one can really only expect one discovery per generation, and this one is ours.

    The show is not perfect, but there are some stunning analogies. I did not write the show, but I fact-checked most of it. There is no attempt to scare the viewer with ‘disaster scenarios’, but simply an attempt to cover what the physicists are constructing and what they expecting or hoping to discover. There is also a bit of history of particle physics.

    Enjoy the show. I’ll stay connected so I can answer any questions that come up.

    photo by Maxmillion Price, copyright CERN

    Insertion of the tracker into the CMS detector. Photo by Maxmillion Price, copyright CERN. Click for full size.

  • Friday Silly Science

    Women are from Maserati, men are from Lamborghini. At least, that’s what science tells us:

    To test the theory that high-performance cars get people hot, Moxon had 40 men and women listen to recordings of the three Italian exotics and a Volkswagen Polo. Everyone had significantly more testosterone after hearing the exotics, and all of the women were turned on by the Maserati. The guys, on the other hand, were drawn to the Lamborghini…

    As for the Polo? Everyone had less testosterone after listening to it.

    The effect could simply be related to Italian cars vs. German cars, of course, rather than the high-performance engines. No word on how Porsches would stack up against Grecavs. Clearly more research needs to be done.

    Note that the Wired blog post is entitled “Science Proves Exotic Cars Turn Women On,” but the study indicates that men are turned on as well. A fast car is equal-opportunity sexy.

  • The Omnivore’s Hundred

    I’ve never been a big fan of those book-memes where you are supposed to highlight the ones you’ve read, etc. But here’s a list that I can’t resist — food! Very Good Taste (via Postbourgie and Ezra Klein) has a list of food items, plus the following instructions:

    1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
    2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
    3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
    4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

    The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

    1. Venison
    2. Nettle tea
    3. Huevos rancheros
    4. Steak tartare
    5. Crocodile
    6. Black pudding
    7. Cheese fondue
    8. Carp
    9. Borscht
    10. Baba ghanoush
    11. Calamari
    12. Pho
    13. PB&J sandwich
    14. Aloo gobi
    15. Hot dog from a street cart
    16. Epoisses
    17. Black truffle
    18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
    19. Steamed pork buns
    20. Pistachio ice cream
    21. Heirloom tomatoes
    22. Fresh wild berries
    23. Foie gras
    24. Rice and beans
    25. Brawn, or head cheese
    26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
    27. Dulce de leche
    28. Oysters
    29. Baklava
    30. Bagna cauda
    31. Wasabi peas
    32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
    33. Salted lassi
    34. Sauerkraut
    35. Root beer float
    36. Cognac with a fat cigar
    37. Clotted cream tea
    38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
    39. Gumbo
    40. Oxtail
    41. Curried goat
    42. Whole insects
    43. Phaal
    44. Goat’s milk
    45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
    46. Fugu
    47. Chicken tikka masala
    48. Eel
    49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
    50. Sea urchin
    51. Prickly pear
    52. Umeboshi
    53. Abalone
    54. Paneer
    55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
    56. Spaetzle
    57. Dirty gin martini
    58. Beer above 8% ABV
    59. Poutine
    60. Carob chips
    61. S’mores
    62. Sweetbreads
    63. Kaolin
    64. Currywurst
    65. Durian
    66. Frogs’ legs
    67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
    68. Haggis
    69. Fried plantain
    70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
    71. Gazpacho
    72. Caviar and blini
    73. Louche absinthe
    74. Gjetost, or brunost
    75. Roadkill
    76. Baijiu
    77. Hostess Fruit Pie
    78. Snail
    79. Lapsang souchong
    80. Bellini
    81. Tom yum
    82. Eggs Benedict
    83. Pocky
    84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
    85. Kobe beef
    86. Hare
    87. Goulash
    88. Flowers
    89. Horse
    90. Criollo chocolate
    91. Spam
    92. Soft shell crab
    93. Rose harissa
    94. Catfish
    95. Mole poblano
    96. Bagel and lox
    97. Lobster Thermidor
    98. Polenta
    99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
    100. Snake

    There is also a vegetarian version, if that’s how you roll. And a FAQ, for those of you who frequently ask questions.

    Apparently I have eaten quite a bit, but still have a ways to go! No cross-outs; that would be a sign of weakness.

    Suggested soundtrack: Bhindi Bagee.