We scare because we care June 30, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Near Physics, Particle Physics, Physics, Science.1 comment so far
I love this movie, Monsters, Inc. It, along with a documentary Office Space, describes our everyday life so well… So today I was reading CNN to get my daily dose of scare to find that CNN also decided to get on the bandwagon and comment about the safety of the LHC in the piece called Some Fear Debut of Powerful Atom Smasher (the coolest thing is that the name of the file in the reference is “doomsdaycollider.ap”). It is of course reassuring that after reading the article the readers are invited to learn more about the subject (look for the reference “All About Atomic and Molecular Physics”) — which shows certain lack of understanding of energy scales involved on the side of the robot which automatically suggests relevant material — of course competent journalists would never never make such a mistake (I also love the phrase “The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.”)… 
Ok, to be fair, the article is actually not that bad. What makes me uncomfortable is people who learned about Newton laws and think that they know all about the Universe — to be comfortable enough to file a lawsuit to stop LHC from turning on (see, for example, “facts” from www.lhcfacts.org). What drives them? Need for nation-wide attention? A. Einstein’s fame? Desire to sell their books? Wait, they don’t (yet) have any books to sell on that subject. Ok, I don’t know… Most of the people who filed a lawsuit in Hawaii to stop LHC (look for Walter Wagner) are not physicists, but people who studied “life sciences.” How can they imagine to be competent enough to claim that LHC will destroy the planet? I’d say, there are many other controvesial subjects they could have contributed to (closer to their speciality) — for instance, study relation of lung-related health and proximity of coal-fired power plants among others…
Really, why bother with LHC if one can simply buy almost all particles that will be produced there? They are just $9 apiece…
At CERN… June 1, 2008
Posted by apetrov in Particle Physics, Physics, Science.2 comments
I arrived to CERN last Monday for a two-week stay. It’s a great place to be this year, as both theoretical and experimental part of the lab (not to say about accelerator people, technicians, etc.) are preparing for the start of the machine, which, according to a recent talk, should happen in July. Last week was one of the “focus weeks” of the very interesting “Flavour as a Window to New Physics at the LHC” workshop. With the recent P5 report to HEPAP, it might just be that flavor physics, once again, comes back to the US (at least in the form of participation in “overseas flavor factory”)…
P.S. Where in the world is that laundry room in Bldg. 41 and where do I buy the detergent? Yeah, questions like that are normally not amongst the greatest mysteries of the Universe…
