Blog – Of Particular Significance

After a few days of preparation, my colloquium on the Large Hadron Collider appears to be ready for presentation at Harvard today.  Typically in a colloquium one discusses some details of one’s own research, but there’s so much to say about the primary physics motivation behind the LHC (clarifying the nature of the Higgs field), the challenges of doing science at such a machine, and the flood of current results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments that I’ll be lucky if I manage to squeeze any of it in. Almost all of my LHC research these days involves trying to make sure that the experimental program is comprehensive and efficient, and isn’t missing anything.  So there’s not much point in trying to explain it to a broad audience of physicists without going through the details  of the LHC first… and doing that easily takes up the whole available hour.

Meanwhile, following up on this post from last week , I have put up a new webpage describing a very interesting class of searches at the Large Hadron Collider that are aimed at finding models which violate the first or second of the assumptions of classic supersymmetry, and produce a new very long-lived particle that is electrically charged and/or is affected by the strong nuclear force.   The methods used actually don’t depend on supersymmetry at all, and can find (or exclude) any similar long-lived particle from any new source.  (The new page accompanies a previous webpage describing a class of searches that are aimed at models that violate the second of the three assumptions of classic supersymmetry, and that therefore often produce photons or Z particles.  More pages of this type are on the way.)

Time for a little insight into what it means to be a professor…

One of the most interesting and challenging tasks that academics, especially academic scientists, are invited to do as part of their careers is to talk about their work, and more generally their field, to an audience consisting of an entire academic department.   This kind of talk is called a “colloquium”, and most departments hold a colloquium weekly.  In a few days I’ll have the honor of giving one. (more…)

Following up on yesterday’s post, I have put up a webpage describing a class of searches that are aimed at models that violate one of the three assumptions of classic supersymmetry, and that therefore often produce photons or Z particles.  More pages of this type are on the way.

A sensitive outsider, watching and reading the press and the physics blogs carefully, might detect an unusual level of irrationality surrounding the topic of supersymmetry, both in terms of what the press is reporting and in terms of what scientists are saying. Not that this is intrinsically abnormal.  Although science is in the long run a largely rational process, scientists themselves are no more rational than anyone else.  Just because you are well-trained to employ rational thinking doesn’t mean you are trained (or could be trained!) to use it exclusively.  Indeed the best scientists, in my experience, tend to have a very individual (and often strikingly unusual) brew of abilities and quirks, with the abilities to think rationally and do mathematics joined to far less stereotypical talents and characteristics.  Some scientists are always passionately certain that their ideas are correct.  Occasionally they are right, though it is rare.  Others are by nature highly skeptical, dismissive of fancy ideas, or fatalistic. All this is to say that there is plenty of rationally-unjustifiable exuberance and scorn in science.  But the amount of it surrounding supersymmetry is a bit higher than usual.  What’s behind it? (more…)