Wednesday, September 10, 2008

We Have Beam!

Well, we are still here. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been turned on, and no black holes have swallowed us up.

Some time ago, I mused on the idea that if Richard Feynman were still alive, he certainly would have a blog. Well, the folks over at Cosmic Variance are the next best thing. Sean Carroll was the instructor for the course in Dark Matter, Dark Energy that I bought from The Teaching Company recently, and as it happens Carroll teaches at CalTech and sits at the very desk that Feynman used to use. Since completing the course, I have been following Sean's blog, which he shares with a few other scientists, and last night there was some real excitement as he blogged in real time during the turning on of the LHC.

Actually, Sean had gone to bed by the time the beam finally made a complete circle around the collider and it was his colleague, JoAnne who stayed up until 1:23 a.m. PDT to give us the news.

Thanks for the thrill, Sean and JoAnne!

3 comments:

  1. In case you were wondering:
    http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

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  2. That's cute, but what does the question mark mean?

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  3. Good question.

    I looked at the page source file. (View menu, page source) It is very witty and has loads of comments.

    The ? is a link to an article (Large and In Charge) about the collider. An inside joke.

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