Particle Physics Is About to be Sexy Again February 11, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in press, science.trackback
Well, that is what the Economist says in a small science and tech article:
Unfortunately for Dr. Aymar, it is Dr. Heuer who will reap the reward, for after a decade and a half in the wilderness since the United States abandoned its own plans for a giant accelerator, called the superconducting super-collider, the subject of particle physics is just about to get sexy again.
Besides the implied total write-off of the Tevatron (grrr!), cool! Glad to see that the Economist gets it. Earlier on in the article it points out why things are about to get sexy again:
Inside it, he and the thousands of other physicists who work at CERN hope to find the secrets of the universe: dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, tiny black holes that evaporate in an eye-blink and the origins of mass itself.
This article was written because Dr. Heuer is about to take over from Dr. Aymar as the head of CERN (a big deal, obviously). And the article was pointing out that Aymar has worked hard to make the LHC come in on time and on budget (well, sort of), but will not be director any longer when the machine turns on and starts producing physics. Bad luck, eh?
Life as a Physicist 
The date on your blog post, February 11, actually had me briefly wondering how I’d managed to lose 4 days. I guess, in revenge, I should put a shameless plug in for my version of a 5th dimension, the contemporaneity of the observers who discuss the event.
Basically, two observers can’t agree on the correct representation of an experiment unless they can agree on whether that experiment is in their past or their future. More generally, people who are living in February 11 cannot communicate in back and forth dialog with people living in February 7. Except maybe on this blog.
One advantage of listing your blog date as 4 days in the future is that your posts show up at the top of “mixed states”, which is how I ran into the confusion.
All my posts have a messed up post date!! I’m not at all sure why — I appologize to everyone that is having to work around this. 😦
It’s a mystery to me too. I’m on WordPress.com as well, but as far as I can see, there’s no way to change the date. Here’s an alleged similar problem with various solutions. It says to go to your “options” page and adjust the number of hours you’re ahead of or behind GMT.
If the problem is easy to fix, your “options” page should list your “Times in this blog should differ by” something like +100 instead of maybe -8. LOL. LOL.
I’m laughing because I don’t have the guts to change the number in my blog (after reading about the various problems mentioned), but I’m willing to advise you to do it.
I wonder what happens if you go there, find a good number, but fix your issue by subtracting 24×4 from it.
Okay, I tested it, and it works. I now have the ability to post from the future too.
This could be convenient if I ever get involved in any priority disputes, LOL.
What i do sometimes is write a few posts into the future for posts that aren’t time dependent. Then I set the “publish” date. Up into this one time, that has always worked for me – and out of the blue this happened the other day. I’ve sent something to wordpress support, but they have no replied, unfortunately. I’ve not looked at the forums either — to busy right now.
The blog posting from the future has been fairly amusing, what with the tie with Everett’s multi-world silly interpretation of QM. I’m going to offer a service where I remind people of their failure to remember an anniversary. (Of course it won’t help them in this time line, but they can be assured that they’ve saved their relationship in some other universe).
I’m fairly satisfied with WordPress. For the price, they do a better job than the alternatives.
As far as I can tell, my messages from the future are over. Lets hope they stay that way. 🙂
I am really enjoying the theme/design of your web site.
Do you ever run into any internet browser compatibility
issues? A small number of my blog visitors have complained about my site not working correctly in Explorer but looks
great in Chrome. Do you have any ideas to help fix this problem?