There are some lovely physics demonstrations that get repeatedly wheeled-out for things like Open Day and visits from school groups. Things like holding a spinning bike wheel on a rotating chair (flip it over and you start rotating – conservation of angular momentum) and levitating a piece of superconductor above a magnet at liquid nitrogen […]
Continue readingIf you want to know when not to expect annihilation of the earth following a second-big-bang in the Large Hadron Collider, I’m afraid the best I can offer you is a link to their press site. http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/schedule/ They are being very coy about exactly when things will happen.
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One of my undergraduate students has been researching gravitational waves this year. Last Friday, he gave a nice presentation on the subject. Gravitational waves are one of the many examples of waves in physics. We are perhaps more used to waves on the surface of water, or waves along a guitar string, or electromagnetic waves […]
Continue readingActivity is really hotting up (should that be ‘cooling down’?) at CERN as the Large Hadron Collider is prepared again for proton-proton collisions, hopefully in November. Most of the beam tunnel is now at operating temperature (1.9 K), with the rest expected to be ready very soon. I would expect to see the collider hitting mainstream […]
Continue readingIn the last few days I’ve had a couple of people ask what is happening with the Large Hadron Collider. Well, if you want the latest news, you can grab the press releases from http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/News.htm . In short, they are doing various tests, and finding and addressing various problems as they arise. It now looks like November […]
Continue readingLast Monday I gave another talk on the Large Hadron Collider, this time in Tauranga. It led to the usual kind of questions (like what is a Higgs Boson?, how fast are these protons going?, how can they be 100% sure it is safe, etc), plus a few less obvious ones, like could they use […]
Continue readingI’ve just been reading in ‘Physics World’ magazine (IOP publishing, physicsworld.com) of one of the less well-known side effects of the delay on the Large Hadron Collider: many PhD students, who hoped by now to have that final bit of data to conclude their PhD theses, are stuck. A PhD is a research degree – […]
Continue readingIn the minds of many, the name ‘Large Hadron Collider’ is linked with the words ‘Higgs Boson’. And so it should be – one of the aims of the LHC is to find (or not to find) this mysterious particle. But what is the Higgs boson? It’s to do with mass. In broad terms, mass […]
Continue readingI gave a talk to the Hamilton Astronomical Society last night on the Large Hadron Collider. It was all very topical back in September, when it was ‘switched on’, but following its breakdown soon later it has rather faded from the popular press. So what is happening now? The simple answer is that it is […]
Continue readingI got some new taps for my kitchen yesterday. The boring technical specitications on that bit of paper marked ‘important – please read’ said ‘do not exceed a pressure of 800 kpa’. Now, leaving aside the fact that it should be ‘kPa’ not ‘kpa’, that means 800 kilopascals. A pascal is the pressure caused by 1 […]
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