the guy by the door …

The $10 Billion  Large Hadron Collider has recorded it’s first collisions at 7 Tev [3.5 Tev/beam]. The design capability of the machine is 9 Tev [4.5 Tev/beam]. The machine was turned on in late 2009 after a repair/recovery mission from a mishap in 2008, but the energy attained was only 2.36 Tev [1.18 Tev/beam]. That was just enough energy to beat the then record holding machine in Batavia Illinois, the Tevatron.  Today’s energy offers the possibility of seeing ‘significant new physics.’

LHC, located at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire¹ [CERN] in Geneva, Switzerland,  a significant world wide web  presence. This is kind of a good thing, given that the World Wide Web emerged from the wilds of speculative research into a household convenience largely due to work by Sir Tim Berners-Lee that was done at and/or paid for by CERN.  But, LHC can claim to be the first major accelerator of the Twitter age. So if you want to follow the nitty gritty details you can. [CERN][USLHC] Look at the ‘following’ lists to get individual experiments. On the other hand, you might feel this is just too much information about the trees and totally lacking a view of the forest. Significant results will no doubt be ’emargoed’ i.e. withheld from the public until a prespecified release date and time. This strategy has two benefits:

1) It gives the collaborations² a chance to be sure of their interpretation of the results.

2)It gives a measure of fairness to theorists at institutions that are ‘less well connected’.³

So you probably won’t see tweets that preview significant findings. If you do, you can bet that PhD student will probably be in a lot of trouble. But you will see tweets that point you to press releases on the major lab sites. And if you want to know what it all means, look to Cosmic Variance.

I am, as I have been for some time now, on the cusp.  $10 Billion could house 25,000 homeless people even at Cambridge prices. It could probably feed millions for years in many parts of the world. There are much more pressing needs to be met. But LHC will help us know a little more about how the universe is made and how it got started. I want to know, even if I can’t be on the frontier myself. $10 Billion probably would not buy one Nimitz class aircraft carrier at today’s prices. We probably can afford to do big science, if we don’t do continuous cascading war. But would we? What new weapons will supersymmetry make possible? And will we build them?⁴ My problem you see, is that I have become stark raving sane.

¹I cut and pasted it. My multi-lingual abilities are limited to knowing when to believe Google translate and when not.

²These experiments are large collaborations. You can readily see from tweets by various member collaborations of LHC that it is in fact, a loose confederation of large collaborations. Perhaps it is time to look once again at a subject that has a significant history at Harvard. The growth of Big Science. Is Derek J.de Solla Price’s  Little Science, Big Science still true?

³I hope at some point to relate the a tale of collegiality vs. insider gossip HEP business. It was between a woman experimentalist protecting her working relationships and a male theorist trying to exploit an ‘insider tip’. Was gender important? I’ll have to let you decide, but Sidney was at his best in settling the disagreement.

⁴ Early in my first year of graduate school, when the Nixon cuts to research budgets had already set in, class discussion turned to the future. Pavao Senjanovic piped up, “If we have a war with Mars, high energy physicists will have jobs.” Thanks, Pavao. You spoke to me only once, but you were kind.