CERN – Slugger O'Toole

NI Science Festival (19 Feb-1 Mar): enough STEM to shake a stick at …

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on February 17, 2015, 5:30 pm

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The inaugural NI Science Festival starts this week and over 11 days it will explode 100 events in venues across Belfast, Derry, Armagh, Glengormley and beyond. Festival Director Chris McCreery jumped from a career in lobbying and public affairs to set up and run the science festival. He told me that being able to programme so many events in its first year “reflects the vibrancy of Northern Ireland’s tech sector, universities and the real interest amongst the general public as …

LHC: “we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one?”

Pete Baker on July 4, 2012, 4:31 pm

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That’s what they’ll be trying to work out over the next few years. Matt Strassler’s probably the man to go to for more on the options ahead. But, for now, the news from Cern is that they have, almost certainly, found “that damned elusive particle“, a Higgs boson. Earlier this morning one of the six theoreticians who predicted the field/boson, Peter Higgs, instructed his family to start chilling the champagne, and Stephen Hawking has conceded that he has lost his …

LHC: “2012 looks set to be a vintage year for particle physics”

Pete Baker on April 5, 2012, 3:10 pm

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As the BBC reports, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] at Cern is back with stable beams of protons after its winter break, and at a new record collision energy of 8 trillion electron volts. From the BBC report Running the LHC at higher energies makes it more likely that Higgs particles, if they exist, will show themselves in the debris of the proton collisions. “The increase in energy is all about maximising the discovery potential of the LHC,” said Cern Research …

Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast…

Pete Baker on February 23, 2012, 6:25 pm

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The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers might be a little premature with his “I told you so“, but the reality is that theoretical physicist Jim “I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV” Al-Khalili can probably put the ketchup down. As the historically “somewhat excited” BBC report, “Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring“. Needless to say, the situation is a little bit more complicated than the BBC headline suggests… As the Guardian report notes Late on Wednesday night, scientists at the Opera …

LHC: “Evidence soon emerged however that this particular squib might be of the damp variety…”

Pete Baker on December 13, 2011, 4:37 pm

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After the hype, “somewhat excited” reporters are straining to sound convincing – the Guardian live-blogged the presentation. And Matt Strassler was at the circus in CERN. I have been chatting with my colleagues, all particle physicists working at or visiting CERN, and finding out how many say that the evidence presented today convinces them that the Higgs has been found. So far — Experimentalists — No: 9, Maybe: 1, and a good one; will explain shortly. Yes: 1 (Tomaso Dorigo, of …

“Maybe Picasso did not paint any pictures at all, at least not the Mona Lisa.”

Pete Baker on December 4, 2011, 3:52 pm

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As the Guardian’s Ian Sample notes from the science desk The runup to Christmas looks exciting for the Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva. Staff at the laboratory have arranged a special seminar on Tuesday 13 December at which the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson will be made public. The presentation is due to happen directly after the lab’s scientific policy committee has convened one of its regular meetings behind closed doors. So what can we …

Faster-than-light neutrinos? “Hold on to that ketchup for now”

Pete Baker on November 24, 2011, 4:49 pm

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If you’ve been confused by recent reports of the on again/off again ‘faster-than-light’ neutrinos Professor Matt Strassler explains, in relatively straight-forward terms, why neither the updated OPERA experiment, nor the findings from ICARUS, really changes the situation. For now. And as theoretical physicist Jim “I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV” Al-Khalili says at Comment is Free The point is that Icarus no more proves Einstein right than Opera proves him wrong. Both results are experimental measurements, not discoveries. A proper test …

Was Einstein wrong? Probably not.

Niall Fealty on September 23, 2011, 4:44 pm

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Ok, this is where my profile picture becomes relevant(-ish) You may have read in the news today that Einstein was wrong. This is due to people drawing conclusions without enough information (it’s not the first time either, see physicists try to destroy Earth with black hole, Higgs boson found, and other such news stories). Luckily though, not everyone out there has jumped on the bandwagon. The result published by CERN today (the paper in question is here) was from an experiment involving …

Now for the science bit…

Pete Baker on September 8, 2011, 6:06 pm

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Quantum field theorist Professor Matt Strassler, whom I mentioned previously and who’s been spending a few days at the Perimeter Institute, takes issue with the science in this BBC science report of “hints” of dark matter in his latest post. Meanwhile, a bit more insight into the CRESST dark matter situation (see yesterday’s post). There have already been silly press articles. The BBC article says Researchers at the Cresst experiment in Italy say they have spotted 67 events in their detectors that may be …

Dr Neil Tyson’s “disturbing” thought for the day

Pete Baker on May 25, 2011, 2:53 pm

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The Guardian’s tame particle physicist, Jon Butterworth, is “playing truant” from the LHC at Cern to attend the Boost 2011 meeting at Princeton. But he’s left a link-tastic post on the results so far. Meanwhile, the Big G’s GrrlScientist points to director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, explaining one of his “disturbing thoughts”. As an aside, the paper, “The Origin of Chemical Elements”, was published in the 1 April 1948 issue of the Physical Review. The …

Tevatron: “My money is on the false alarm at the moment”

Pete Baker on April 9, 2011, 6:11 pm

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A somewhat excited BBC report of potentially ground-breaking interim results from Cern LHC rival accelerator, Tevatron, is undermined by the statistical possibility of a false alarm. The Guardian’s tame particle physicist, at Cern, Jon Butterworth explains. If the histograms and data are exactly right, the paper quotes a one-in-ten-thousand (0.0001) chance that this bump is a fluke. That’s pretty small; although bear in mind that lots of distributions like this get plotted. If you plot 100 different distributions, the chances become about …

LHC: “if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach…”

Pete Baker on February 1, 2011, 2:09 pm

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The Large Hadron Collider at Cern had been scheduled to take a year-long break at the end of 2011, before returning at full power, 7 TeV per beam, in 2012/13. But, as the Guardian’s tame particle physicist Jon Butterworth notes, a new schedule has been announced. From Jon Butterworth The LHC will run through 2011 and 2012, rather than shutting down for more than a year at the end of 2011 as previously planned. This is great news for those of …

“a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons.”

Pete Baker on November 7, 2010, 7:37 pm

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As the BBC noted, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has switched from firing beams of protons to beams of heavy [lead] ions. From the BBC report One of the scientists who will be taking a part in the experiment is David Evans from the University of Birmingham, UK. “Although the tiny fireballs will only exist for a fleeting moment (less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) the temperatures will reach over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than …

“Higgs, Higgs, glorious Higgs…”

Pete Baker on August 26, 2010, 1:30 pm

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A little bit of culture, and science, from the CERN choir via CERNTV. It’s no Large Hadron Collider rap… ANYhoo… Enjoy! Pete Baker