Virtual No More

The Large Hadron Collider never felt real.
For several years I was a high-energy particle theorist. I wanted to know how to experimentally test wild questions: Are there tiny curled up extra dimensions? Where do the masses of the elementary particles come from? Which laboratory has the best cafeteria? The answer to all of those was [...]

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The Atom Smashers: Deservingly audacious

The Atom Smashers, a documentary about physicists at the Tevatron searching for the Higgs boson, has won the Audacity Award in the Pariscience festival. This award is “for a film that shows originality in its subject matter or treatment.”
Congratulations to Clayton and Monica. You can find my review of this excellent film here.

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Physics Nobels

The Nobel prize for physics has been announced. This year half of it goes to Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa and the other half to Yoichiro Nambu; all particle physicists.
As always, there is a lot of controversy with this choice. When I first heard the recipients my first thought, and I suspect almost every particle physicist [...]

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Here be dragons

So, there’s a shiny new hadron collider in Geneva, and not only is it large, it works! The next step, of course, is for it to make all kinds of spectacular discoveries about the fundamental structure of matter. All across the blogosphere people are putting forth their predictions for what the Large Hadron Collider will [...]

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