I don’t know if you read the report (released on the 15th October) about the damage to the LHC that occurred during the “September 19th incident”. Just in case, it is in pdf format here. The upshot is that there’s a lot of work to do. There are of course … Click to continue reading this post
Seth Zenz at LHC Blogs pointed to the video of a talk by Lyn Evans (the LHC project leader) about the LHC, with lots of details about the damage and repairs process, and where the schedule is now. Seth also wrote a transcript of lots of it, which you can … Click to continue reading this post
Just the other day, while coordinating some work being done on my house, I was thinking that it is time I learned Spanish. Most of the people working in the construction industry here in Los Angeles have Spanish as their first language, and besides the usefulness it would give in communicating difficult ideas about a piece of work to be carried out, I really don’t like the feeling that I’m disconnected from them. I’d like to be able at least to, in Spanish, offer a cup of coffee, or a glass of iced water, and have a little small talk – treat them like fellow human beings as opposed to “the help” as is done so much in this city, to my disgust. I interact a lot with the Spanish-speaking parts of the city through my use of public transport, places I go to grab tasty food from time to time, and so on, but there is still a sense that there is an entire alternative Los Angeles out there that I am only barely touching upon by not knowing the language.
Then yesterday this whole Spanish language issue came up again in a big way. There was a phone call to the department from Univision, the Spanish-language TV network. Probably most of you are wondering what that is. You know those several channels that you never watch and when you flick by them, all clustered together, they’re always speaking Spanish and discussing issues or people that you seldom (if ever) have heard of? Yes. This is one of those channels. There’s a huge part of America (and elsewhere) that tune to those channels primarily.
Well, the people at Univision had heard about the excitement about the Large Hadron Collider (see, e.g. last post) and wanted to do a piece on it, and have someone in the studio to talk about it live on their breakfast show. They were looking for a […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it seems that the largest and most complicated experiment in the history of humankind is…. working so far. They circulated the first beams at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) earlier today! Even Google is excited. Check out their front page:
Fun live blogging reports from the scene of events over at Resonaances, US/LHC Blogs (several posts), and Superweak, for example. I got the ATLAS readout/image below from the latter. (Presumably this is the shower of particles produced when they did the “dumping” described in Resonaances? Or just stuff produced by the edges of the beam as it passes through?) Press release from CERN here.
Update: NPR’s Morning Edition had a nice report this morning in the form of a chat between Rene Montagne and reporter David Kestenbaum. Fun to hear the audio clip of the control room. Link here.
Oh, right. The silliness. Click on that useful site I mentioned earlier to see if the earth Click to continue reading this post
I just learned from the US/LHC blogs that the first circulating beam of the Large Hadron Collider will be attempted on September 10th. The press release is here, and is from where I stole the image (left) of the fancy-looking CERN Control Centre. This is so exciting! It’s not long now for possible new physics (some months or so beyond that date, or early 2009) from this long, long awaited machine. In the meantime, lots of other warm-up test will be going on too. Link here for more.
For more on the LHC and why we care, see several older posts here (this one links to lots of things), including the ones pointing to the nice NPR pieces (here, and here). Be sure to watch the excellent videos showing you the inside of one of the detectors (links in […] Click to continue reading this post
