Ideas Worth Spreading

Thanks to my father-in-law, who has mentioned this several times over the last year or two, I have become somewhat addicted to TED talks. Basically TED is an annual conference (plus spin-offs) full of very clever and interesting people speaking (or performing) on pretty much anything they want.

Browse through the archives and you will find Al Gore telling us how to combat climate change, geeks demonstrating spectacular user interfaces, a neuroscientist talking about what it is like to have a stroke, a presentation of images from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and my new hero, Clifford Stoll, talking about... well... pretty much everything and anything.

Inspiring stuff, this, and I've barely scraped the surface so far.

The Definite Particle

Well, we have a beam going all the way around, yay! Looking at the grid monitoring systems our site is still up and running. All good.

Actually, not much work is being done here at RAL — there is a big area in one of the other buildings with a couple of screens showing News24, and this is full of people drinking coffee and eating cake. Elsewhere on site, many of the people not down there have live news coming out of radios and PCs in their offices.

This really is a big deal. While we are some way off actually having any serious results coming out of the LHC (they need to get a beam circulating in the other direction, then get collisions happening, and then ramp the energy levels up to the point where the exciting stuff can actually happen), the media coverage has been phenomenal and despite the rubbish being spouted about the end of the world, we are actually seeing some good mainstream science coverage. It's really difficult to explain just how cool this is, but I think this will probably have the significance of (or exceeding) the moon landings. Only time will tell.

I'm just chuffed (and humbled) to actually be a very tiny part of this experiment. I wish I understood it better, but it's a good incentive to do some more studying.