{"id":874,"date":"2008-09-04T20:10:38","date_gmt":"2008-09-05T01:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=874"},"modified":"2008-10-10T08:48:49","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T13:48:49","slug":"lhc-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=874","title":{"rendered":"LHC Roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC is still set for next Wednesday, and the media is already full of LHC stories, with a lot more to come next week. Events are being organized all over the world to celebrate the day, including a 1:30 am pajama party<\/a> at Fermilab (see here<\/a>). Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a page one story<\/a> about preparations at CERN that focus on improvisational comedy training for physicists to help them communicate.<\/p>\n

For more serious news from the LHC, you can try following progress at CERN’s startup site<\/a> for the public, or at the technical LHC commissioning site<\/a>. Latest available minutes<\/a> from the Installation and Commissioning Committee are here, including a timeline and objectives<\/a> for the next few days and for September 10. The “also going on” column for September 10 lists just “chaos”. <\/p>\n

Science magazine has some excellent LHC-related stories in this week’s issue<\/a>. In this one<\/a>, various people explain what the LHC is looking for and why it will take a while to get results. Gordy Kane is having none of that though, predicting discovery of supersymmetry next month:<\/p>\n

“We predict a signature that they could see with five events,” says Michigan’s Kane. “They could see it in the first week of running in October.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another article, Researchers, Place Your Bets!<\/a>, features bloggers Tommaso Dorigo and Jacques Distler. Tommaso has bet that the LHC will see no deviations from the standard model, although from what I remember, he did this just because if this happens it will be so depressing that at least some cash will cheer him up. Gordy Kane and Stuart Raby claim supersymmetry is such a sure thing that they can’t find anyone who will bet against it. Distler’s comment on this is:<\/p>\n

I wonder how hard they tried.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same article gives links to sites where you can bet on the Higgs boson discovery date.<\/p>\n

Nature magazine is running an LHC-related editorial Cool Philosophies<\/a> in this week’s issue. It is inspired by an interesting recent preprint by philosopher of science Alexei Grinbaum: On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics<\/a>. Grinbaum gives an extensive discussion of the current state of particle theory and its societal context. He ends with a philosophical section on fine-tuning and currently popular anthropic arguments, arguing that these often invoke an invalid use of counterfactuals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC is still set for next Wednesday, and the media is already full of LHC stories, with a lot more to come next week. Events are being organized all over the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1013,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions\/1013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}