Hi — and welcome to this growing website.
The long-term goal of the site is to provide the public with both the background information needed to understand more about science in general — what it is, how it is done, what it means to modern life — and more specifically about what is happening to their investment in my field — particle physics. Meanwhile, I will also be providing some up-to-date information about what is happening in particle physics and other nearby subjects.
Since this site is still young, there are still many web-pages still to be constructed, and I will be adding things regularly. So when you visit the site, in addition to looking at any daily posts to the blog, please check also for new pedagogical or analytic articles that will be linked within the site. Those articles will remain up until they go out of date, and so my intention is that they be carefully written and pedagogically oriented.
Now — and I really mean this — if you find you don’t understand what I’ve written, please feel free to ask what you might think are “dumb” questions. In my view there are no dumb questions; it’s my fault if you don’t understand. The goal of the site is to be clear to the public, and the only way I can figure out where I am failing to make things transparent is to hear back from you.
Where might you start? Well, my most pedagogical starting point as of right now (9/12/2011) would be this article
and if that isn’t advanced enough, or you simply want to go further, try
which might lead you to wonder “what are protons?” (which is what the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] usually smashes)
- What’s a Proton? (read this one first)
- What’s a Hadron? (not essential, as you’ll see, but here if you need it)
and also how one does measurements at such a machine
This is an insanely brilliant and lucid site. Must read each morning. It is naturally focused on the experiments and theory, and is simply marvelous there. But every few hours, the LHC ops pages change, with reference to concepts of beam physics that can be puzzling. e.g., What is the relationship between emittance and beam size? What, other than electrons and UFOs, can cause vacuum problems? What happens to the electrons (if anything, given the current problems at P2?) What does a collimator jaw look like, and what geometries can it assume? What is really the difference between momentum cleaning and betatron cleaning? Why do beam lifetimes ultimately go UP, although they are pretty raggedy lately? Your insanely lucid explications would surely help dashboard watchers, between conferences. Best, Pete Stokely (Classical Music Writer).
Very kind of you to say that… unfortunately I am *not* a dashboard watcher or an accelerator physics expert, so this would not be trivial for me to do. That said, I’ll keep it in mind, and if/when I do learn enough, will put something up about it. [A fellow classical music writer... spent a year at the Paris Conservatory before going to grad school.]
Matt, this is NOT for posting, but I needed to suggest, for the record, what a splendid thing you have set out to to do, and how splendidly you are doing it.
Paris Conservitoire? Good grief! What is is about music and chemistry (Borodin) Engineering (Boulez) and Physics (e.g., YOU?)
I had to get to MIT to realize that I had always been able to fake what a true mathematical mind would actually understand. Tensor calculus exposed me to this futility. I hit the wall. Same for group theory. I could TEACH MIT courses in elementary group theory (I did) and now have no clue about the symmetry groups of the SM. There are only 3 of them, for god’s sake, and I don’t understand any of them.
Hence my violent encouragement for ANYTHING you do. I found myself telling my wife about the NECESSITY for a Higgs field. And how unhappy the LHC experience has been (so far) with respect to BSM. Your ability to make horrendously complicated things conceptually simple (or if not simple, at least reduced to the least complicated propositions) is simply magical.
Abundant thanks!
—pete
peter@stokely.com
It would be very interesting to hear about the “unidentified falling objects”.
I recently discovered this site and simply want to say thank you. I do not have a math or science background. Late in life I developed a totally unexpected interest. Thank you for taking the time to make otherwise brain numbing science so much more accessible to the average person. It is greatly appreciated.
Phenomenal work Dr. Strassler. Wonder if you’ve heard of/read anything by Michael Nielsen? He wrote a book about “networked science” and is currently trying to address the difficulties of large-scale scientific collaborations like the LHC. To post a small excerpt:
“The LHC analyses about 600 million particle collisions per second. The data analysis is done using a cluster of more than 200,000 processing cores, and tens of millions of lines of software code. That code is built on all sorts of extremely specialized knowledge and assumptions about detector and beam physics, statistical inference, quantum field theory, and so on… it’s possible that very few (no?) people will understand in much depth even just the principles behind the chain of evidence. How many people have truly mastered quantum field theory, statistical inference, detector physics, and distributed computing? What, then, should we make of any paper announcing that the Higgs boson has been found?”
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/some-garbage-in-gold-out/
It’s a challenging thought, and one that I thought you might be able to address better than most. Thanks much!
I have not read his work; thanks for pointing it out. It is certainly impressive that a collective effort of people who only see part of the whole can lead to real scientific achievements — but the very fact that the LHC operates successfully and that so much of its data matches theoretical expectations is already evidence that it works. However, I’m not sure whether it is such a new thing. I suspect that you could argue that this also works sometimes in large corporations, a few of which operate very effectively. Something to think about…
Hi Prof Strassler,
Excellent Work and I’m a fan of your site. It’s a joy to be able to spend my lunch breaks diving into this strange and wonderful section of reality you and your colleagues are exploring!
I’m a technology professional and have been analyzing, displaying and tracking trends in complex data sets for years. I’m wondering what role you see (if any) in fields of research like yours for folks like me that know a little bit about science and a lot about data.
Thanks!
Well — that’s a tough question for me to answer, mainly because there are some people in the field who know a lot about science *and* a lot about data, and I’m not one of them. It’s they who would know better what their challenges are and where data experts can perhaps add something. The good thing about my field is that people are very creative and self-reliant. The bad thing is that they are often slow to take advantage of advances in other areas of research, thinking they can do it themselves. So there may be room for an exchange of ideas.
Maybe one of my readers has something smarter to say about this than I do…
I like Matt Magazine.