See CERN History December 1, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in CERN, Fermilab, physics life.trackback
This is a quick note to draw your attention to a small retrospective program that CERN has put together – “From the Proton Synchroton to the Large Hadron Collider – 50 Years of Nobel Memories in High-Energy Physics” – yeah, yeah, it is like a Microsoft product name, but check out the list of speakers – 13 of them are Nobel prize winners. And these are all “memory” talks – so they should be quite entertaining. The event will be video-broadcast over the internet – a link should appear in that agenda page where you can watch. The time is European central – which is 9 hours ahead of Pacific time in the USA.
The context for this event is the turn-on of the LHC, of course. The accelerator recently took the title of “most powerful accelerator in the world” away from Fermilab – and is on its way to a turn-on and real data. Ironically, I was on shift at Fermilab a few hours before this event happened – my plan was to call up the ATLAS control room if it did happen and congratulate them… but I was asleep by the time it actually happened.
I’m at CERN now – and the atmosphere is electric. This review talk is a perfect stepping stone for the future.
Life as a Physicist 
As another blog (I can’t find the post now) pointed out the LHC is the most energetic not the most powerful.
The Tevatron is still the highest energy collider, and when it loses that title it can still claim to be the highest energy proton-antiproton collider.
Hi Mike – yes, you are right. The LHC is proton-on-proton, not anti-proton-on-proton. So at the same energy the Tevatron is more likely to produce various rare decay products than the lhc. In some cases it will take a x3 times more energy to make the same thing at the LHF.
[…] Gordon Watts […]
There’s no link at the web site, too bad 😦
I mean, for the video-broadcast
There us! Just go here: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=70765 – near the top of the page there is a “live broadcast” lin. They will be posting archived video over the next week or two.
Does anyone know if there is a transcript from this meeting? Great set of sepakers.
At the very top of the web page there is a link “Video in CDS”. Click on that and you get the complete video archive. I’m afraid there are no text transcriptions, however. Sorry. 😦
Thanks. I just saw some of these. Classic t’Hooft. Pushing BH in addition to Higgs while pretending GHK does not exist. I sure he doesn’t recognize APS or the Sakurai Prize either as any sort of authority on topic. He forgets that he and Veltman referenced all three in their Nobel winning paper.
As I said, classic t’Hooft.
t’Hooft probably doesn’t realize (or want to realize) BE have error in their paper (that E fixes in subsequent talks). They handle the poles wrong at top of second page of their paper.
APS April meeting PR from AIP…interesting.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/major-physics-conference-next-month-in-washington-d-c-highlights-of-american-physical-society-aps-and-american-association-of-physics-teachers-aapt-joint-meeting-february-13-17-2010