Posts by richard
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Hard News: OGB Update, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben -- around an hour.
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If you can't go the Great Blend, you CAN go to this:
http://www.physics.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/events/template/event_item.jsp?cid=495704
A public lecture on the LHC and the recent discovery there from Mark Kruse, a member of the ATLAS collaboration...
(Sorry for posting to two threads :-)
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On the other hand, if you do want to see a talk on the LHC (and the Higgs) from a specialist, this will be a great event
http://www.physics.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/events/template/event_item.jsp?cid=495704
No promises about the Comic Sans though.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Is boiling down complex ideas for non-specialist audiences a hard thing to do at all well? Yes – which is why I admire good general-interest writing/journalism about science so much. But it’s a skill not a mystical vocation. I’m just suggesting it’s not only a healthy contribution to the culture for more scientists to develop that ability, but entirely in their enlightened self-interest. Science isn’t just about the seminar room and the research lab
Scientists should (and often can) be able to boil down complex ideas for non-specialist audiences. But this was a talk for SCIENTISTS that, most unusually, was watched by a large international audience that probably had a large fraction of non-scientists.
The slides for the ATLAS talk are here
https://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=1&resId=1&materialId=slides&confId=197461
and even aside from the Comic Sans, they are clearly well-stuffed with technical detail. This was not intended to be an accessible talk, but it does a very good job of communicating with particle physicists. Of the people I know who were in the room, not one of them complained about the slides.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to BenWilson,
Just discovering the Higgs does not directly change our current picture of the evolving universe, but it gives us lots of new questions to ask, and sharpens some of the old ones.
In particular, this is the first time we have discovered a spinless (which autocorrect just turned to “spineless”) and apparently fundamental particle. These particles (or, more accurately, the fields associated with these particles) play a key role in cosmology because they can have negative pressure, and negative pressure (think rubber bands, as opposed to a tank of gas) can cause the expansion rate of the universe to accelerate (long story, but trust me).
And the universe is accelerating today, and also apparently underwent a phase of acceleration in the very universe, just after the big bang. And we would like to know WHY (and HOW) this happens.
Just seeing the Higgs does not solve these riddles, but it does make cosmologists feel much better about building theories with spinless fields in them,
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Speaking of the Higgs, there is a free public lecture at the University of Auckland on July 12, 6:30pm, by Prof Mark Kruse (Duke University), who works on the ATLAS collaboration.
http://www.physics.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/events/template/event_item.jsp?cid=495704
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
Functionality. Sure, a pot “works” for boiling water for tea, but it’s not as good as a kettle and occasionally you burn yourself.
Comic sans itself isn’t a huge problem in that regard but it is a sign of someone likely to go wrong.
I agree. Although FWIW, the “functionality” of those slides is probably very different to a specialist – to the non-specialist, the physics content might almost be “Lorem ipsum” but I had no trouble reading the slides, or following the presentations. And it was primarily a technical presentation.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Actually, NASA has a reputation for "managing" news releases for maximum impact, and sometimes distorts the science in doing so, even if their graphics people will deliver slick images. CERN is run by scientists to a much greater extent than NASA, and there is a lot to be said for the latter approach.
The stuff produced by CERN's public affairs people is very slick.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to James Butler,
Sick – but not undeserved – burn.
Sorry – couldn’t resist it.
But now we have to figure out a) if it is a “minimal” Higgs, or something more complicated, b) what dark matter is made of, we know its there in the universe is good chance it can be made at the LHC, and c) why there is more matter in the universe than anti-matter, which may or may not be settled by the LHC. So lots to do.
As an aside, the actual discovery yesterday was of a scalar (or spinless) particle – not necessarily the Higgs per se. Scalar fields play a vital role in early universe cosmology, and there has always been some nervousness in the field because no-one has ever seen a fundamental scalar in nature. Until yesterday.
The cosmological scalar fields (which cause something called inflation, a period of extra-rapid expansion just after the big bang, and working on the nuts and bolts of this is how I put a roof over my head, so it is subject dear to my heart) are probably not the Higgs itself, but my Facebook feed yesterday was full of happy posts from happy theoretical cosmologists knowing that there was one question they would never again be asked by the curmudgeons in the front row when they gave a seminar.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Sacha,
Moving shots on tv of Peter Higgs in the audience too.
And the guys sitting next to him :-)