It’s mid-semester break here at Waikato so I have time to breathe and get back to things other than teaching, such as seeing what the PhD students are up to. Yay. But, here’s a comment about what I was talking about last week with the first year students: conservation of momentum. If you look in […]
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Natural units
Physics is all about describing physical quantities. Whether it’s length, velocity, force, electric current or heat flux, it takes physics to describe what it is and what it does. Central to this is our system of units. The three really common base units (in the S.I. system) are the metre (unit of length), the second […]
Continue readingThe inverse femtobarn
Tomorrow I’m going to Te Aroha to give a talk to their continuing education group on the Large Hadron Collider. This is something I foolishly agreed to do many months ago (maybe it was even last year) before I realized how much lecturing I had this semester. Still, I’ve given the talk a few times […]
Continue readingPhysics discoveries
I’ve been thinking a bit more about the comment I made yesterday that there used to be a time that physics discoveries were made by people but now we just need to build a machine to do it (the LHC). The major science discoveries, almost by definition, are unexpected and can be very serendipitous. The […]
Continue readingWhat’s CERN twittering about?
A quick skim of CERN’s Twitter site, www.twitter.com/cern tells me that the LHC is going to be pootling on for the next two years at 3.5 TeV per beam, before it is prepared for running at 7 TeV, starting hopefully in 2014 "…[This] gives the LHC’s experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the […]
Continue readingSome data from ATLAS at the LHC
No, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t vanished. It might not be so prominent in the news as it was two years ago, but it is quietly colliding protons together and generating lots of useful data for analysis. Here’s a couple of bits which I gleaned in Melbourne 1. What lies inside a quark (if anything?). […]
Continue readingClimate change and conferences
Back on-line now after a week in Melbourne at the Australian Institute of Physics conference. I have lots of good stuff to blog about, including optomechanics (using light to cause vibrations), physics education (lots on this), the Large Hadron Collider and complicated models of things that might not even exist, but I’ll do this one on climate […]
Continue readingWhat’s cooking at the LHC?
I’ve just been perusing CERN’s Twitter site http://www.twitter.com/cern for some of their latest news. While the Higgs is still hiding inside some time-travelling baguette, there’s still some really nice physics arising. This example is one that caught my attention – it’s the detection of a bound state made up of a beauty (or bottom) quark […]
Continue readingQuarks Galore
Here’s a nice example of some particle physics from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/Images_2010/BsDsMuNu.png (taken from the LHCb news page at http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/ ) The picture shows an unfortunately-named Bs particle (for Beauty Strange), produced as a result of a 7 TeV proton-proton collision. This particle doesn’t live long; it decays into a Ds+ […]
Continue readingCollisions at the LHC
While I’ve been away the Large Hadron Collider has been busy smashing protons together, and is now beginning to acquire some data that will be making some PhD students very happy. This is one of the images that has been released by CERN: (see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1255405) It shows a collision in the ATLAS detector (the largest […]
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