Daily Archives: November 25, 2008

Tales From The Industry XXVII – Light Speed

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Here we go again! Tonight sees another new episode of the new series of The Universe on the History Channel (you can watch it as a warm up to The Atom Smashers, on PBS), and the episode is all about the speed of light! I’ve no idea how this one will turn out, but for my segments we did some rather fun things to illustrate some of the key concepts. The main idea is that the laws of physics are rather different from ordinary Newtonian/Galilean ones when you are moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed the light. This is what we learned from Einstein’s Special Relativity. How do you illustrate this for a TV viewing audience? Well, one way is to imagine what would happen if the speed of light was a lot closer to everyday speeds. Then you could illustrate some of the effects in a fun way.

Well, one thing led to another and somehow (after a lot of email discussions of the physics with Darryl Rehr, the writer/director) it ended up that I was supposed to do […] Click to continue reading this post →

Particle Physics on TV Tonight

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marcela carena in atom smashers independent lens

I learned from Katherine on the US/LHC blog earlier that tonight on PBS is an airing of a documentary called “The Atom Smashers”. It’s about particle physicists at Fermilab, in Illinois (including my friend Marcela Carena in the photo above). I’m curious to see what they’ve put together, hoping that it’ll give the public some insights into the life of the various kinds of scientist involved, and the exciting physics that engages them – and those of us on the outside who eagerly await the results of their work. The search for the Higgs boson is a focus. You can see a trailer here. I’ll be watching, I think. It is at 10:30pm on PBS, in the Independent Lens series, but be sure to check your local listings since times may vary.

Enjoy!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →