Flank Speed

In high-energy particle physics news, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has started its commissioning process, firing the first batches of protons through its circular tunnel Wednesday morning. Now that it is being activated, this particle accelerator, straddling the border between France and Switzerland outside the city of Geneva, is the world’s most powerful physics experiment.

You may have seen some of the news coverage of this event; here are some selected links:

• Of course, the event was live-blogged!
• The LHC has a public site, with ongoing news, and another site for physicists with more technical information
• What will they find using the LHC? Some physicists offer their opinions. Here, the Higgs boson is a predicted particle that “assigns masses” to the other elementary particles, and supersymmetry is a theory that predicts each particle known today will have a partner with the same charge, etc. but much larger mass.
• You asked for it — physics humor.

Here are some science and science-related stories for the past week or so:

• On the teaching of evolution in a Florida classroom; what do you think about the methods of the teacher, and the article itself? (free registration required)
• Here is the latest on a scientist accused of making up research results; I can provide more information if anyone is interested.
• From the BBC, an article on whether the lifetime of the US shuttle program may be extended due to delays in the “next-generation” spacecraft
• At present, a majority of astronomers believe that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible, or “dark” matter; here is another BBC article about new research results on this dark matter
• More of a sociology issue, but how teenagers evaluate themselves and other peers socially

Here are links to some recent news stories:

• How easy will it be to travel to the nearest stars? One of my favorite blogs, Centauri Dreams covers a recent meeting called the Joint Propulsion Conference, organized by NASA, the US Air Force and others.
• Another recent conference was held by the Office of Naval Research, where they met with industry representations, and asked for ideas on some cool toys.
• You may have heard that Pluto was recently demoted from “planet” status. This is not a settled matter, since scientists are still debating the point. Another article deals with Pluto’s satellite, Charon.
• An interesting development in modern warfare is cyberwarfare; evidence that this happened to Georgia in its conflict with Russia is reported in the NY Times (free registration required). Also in the Times is an AP story about the US Navy’s recent settlement about its use of sonar for training.
• Finally, the death of the US Navy’s DDG-1000 program, and why the Arleigh Burke class is still the one.