Of Particular Significance

Tag: PublicOutreach

If you’re curious to know what my book is about and why it’s called “Waves in an Impossible Sea”, then watching this video is currently the quickest and most direct way to find out from me personally. It’s a public talk that I gave to a general audience at Harvard, part of the Harvard Bookstore science book series.

My intent in writing the book was to illuminate central aspects of the cosmos — and of how we humans fit into it — that are often glossed over by scientists and science writers, at least in the books and videos I’ve come across. So if you watch the lecture, I think there’s a good chance that you’ll learn something about the world that you didn’t know, perhaps about the empty space that forms the fabric of the universe, or perhaps about what “quantum” in “quantum physics” really means and why it matters so much to you and me.

The video contains 35 minutes of me presenting, plus some Q&A at the end. Feel free to ask questions of your own in the comments below, or on my book-questions page; I’ll do my best to answer them.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON November 4, 2024

On my recent trip to CERN, the lab that hosts the Large Hadron Collider, I had the opportunity to stop by the CERN control centre [CCC]. There the various particle accelerator operations are managed by accelerator experts, who make use of a host of consoles showing all sorts of data. I’d not been to the CCC in person — theoretical physicists congregate a few kilometers away on another part of CERN’s campus — although back in the LHC’s very early days, when things ran less smoothly, I used to watch some of the CCC’s monitoring screens to see how the accelerator was performing.

The atmosphere in the control room was relatively quiet, as the proton-proton collisions for the year 2024 had just come to an end the previous day. Unlike 2023, this has been a very good year. There’s a screen devoted to counting the number of collisions during the year, and things went so well in 2024 it had to be extended, for the first time, by a “1” printed on paper.

The indication “123/fb” means “123-collisions-per-femtobarn”, while one-collision-per-femtobarn corresponds to about 1014 = 100,000,000,000,000 proton-proton collisions. In other words, the year saw more than 12 million billion proton-proton collisions at each of the two large-scale experiments, ATLAS and CMS. That’s about double the best previous year, 2018.

Yes, that’s a line of bottles that you can see on the back wall in the first photo. Major events in the accelerator are often celebrated with champagne, and one of the bottles from each event is saved for posterity. Here’s one from a few weeks ago that marked the achievement of 100-collisions-per-femtobarn.

With another one and a half seasons to go in Run 3 of the LHC, running at 13.6 TeV of energy per collision (higher than the 13 TeV per collision in Run 2 from 2015 to 2018, and the 7 and 8 TeV per collision in Run 1 from 2010 to 2012), the LHC accelerator folks continue to push the envelope. Much more lies ahead in 2029 with Run 4, when the collision rate will increase by another big step.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 30, 2024

Recently a reader, having read my post about why the speed of light seems so fast, sent me two questions that highlight important cosmic issues.

  1. Is there in fact anything within physics as it’s presently understood that indeed prevents […] there existing something other than atoms as some basic “unit”?
  2. I’ve long wondered why it is that despite the seeming brilliance of humans at building such complex understanding, we are still pushing at such limits as the time it would take to fly a space ship to another galaxy. Is it really true that nothing could ever exceed ‘c’ and thus we are indeed doomed to take lifetimes to travel beyond our solar system? Or is it because we have not yet discovered something much more fundamental about the universe, such as an ‘alternative to’ the atom?

These deep questions are examples of an even broader pair of questions about reality.

  • Which aspects of the cosmos are contingent?—in that one could easily imagine a similar universe in which these details are thoroughly altered.
  • Which aspects of the cosmos appear rock solid?—in that they are so deeply integrated into the universe that it is difficult to imagine changing them without ruining everything.
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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 28, 2024

Geneva, Switzerland, is not known for its sunny weather, and seeing the comet here was almost impossible, though I caught some glimpses. I hope many of you have seen it clearly by now. It’s dim enough now that dark skies and binoculars are increasingly essential.

I came here (rather than the clear skies of, say, Morocco, where a comet would be an easier target) to give a talk at the CERN laboratory — the lab that hosts the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], where the particle known as the Higgs boson was discovered twelve years ago. This past week, members of the CMS experiment, one of the two general purpose experiments at the LHC, ran a small, intensive workshop with a lofty goal: to record vastly more information from the LHC’s collisions than anyone would have thought possible when the LHC first turned on fifteen years ago.

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Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 21, 2024

It’s been quite a week… Spectacular northern lights for hours on Thursday night. A great comet in the evening skies (though so far I’ve have only caught glimpses, thanks to atrocious viewing conditions.) And now, I’m at CERN (the pan-European particle physics laboratory) for the first time since the pandemic began. I’ll be giving a talk at a conference of CMS experimenters. (CMS and ATLAS are the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC].)

The topic of the workshop is a novel technique called “Level-1 Scouting” — though it isn’t really about “scouting” for anything. It has to do with evading the strait-jacket of the trigger, an essential feature of data gathering at each of the LHC experiments. With tens of millions of collisions per second, the data flood at CMS is too great, and only a tiny fraction of these collisions can be stored. The trigger decides real-time which ones to keep and which ones to discard forever. That’s been the basic rule since the LHC began running.

But this rule no longer applies, thanks to new technology and human ingenuity. CMS now uses level-1 scouting to record sketchy information about every single collision that happens in their detector. LHCb, with a smaller detector, was the first to try something along these lines. ATLAS is on a parallel track. These developments have the potential, looking ahead, to substantially enhance the capability of these detectors. More about this after I’ve given my talk.

Auroras after sunset. (These were as bright to the naked eye)
Comet A3 after sunset. (Brighter than to the naked eye.)

Post-sunset light over CERN. (As to the naked eye.)

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 14, 2024

I hope many of you saw auroras (northern lights) last night! I briefly saw the strongest steady red glow I myself have ever observed, visible even amid street lights and my neighbors’ house lights.

The skies, shown only slightly brighter than to the naked eye, as seen at 8pm Boston time. Credit: Matt Strassler

Then, after a break as some clouds rolled in, we were graced with a few hours of mostly diffuse green glow with patches of dim but distinct red that would come and go. All these colors were visible with the naked eye, albeit much less bright than shown in photos. It was quite a storm, not as violently active as the one earlier this year, but very persistent.

The storm lasted all night, though the auroras varied greatly in brightness. Data from https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

I also tried to find Comet A3 just after sunset, but failed, even with the help of binoculars. Apparently the brief spike in its brightness, due to “forward scattering” as it passed between us and the Sun, may have died off too quickly, leaving it impossible to see in early twilight. It will become dimmer day by day, but it will also be visible later each evening, and at some point should become easy to see in dark skies. Let me know when you first observe it!

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON October 11, 2024

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