CERN press conference: Discovery of the Higgs boson

July 4, 2012

Here is the complete press conference held today, July 4, 2012, at the CERN offices in Geneva, Switzerland.  (Alas, the press conference was not held in Cedar Hill, Texas, making it a monument to the dangers of saying “we can’t be great in America any more” and refusing to appropriate money for science, or anything else good.)

This may be the biggest discovery of the decade for particle physics; it’s incredibly exciting, despite the appearance of calm.  It may be the biggest discovery of the century.  (We have 88 years left in the century, too.)

Description from the poster:

Published on Jul 4, 2012 by

This is the full press conference update on the search for the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. This press conference followed the 2-hour Seminar that you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAlgX4FNiyM

This original CERN webcast recording was officially published at https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1459604 but I re-uploaded it here because YouTube is best. The CERN Copyright notice seems to say doing something like this may be ok http://copyright.web.cern.ch/ but if they release this video on the official http://youtube.com/cerntv YouTube channel, I may remove this copy from my YouTube account.

So, if the video above goes dark, check the official CERN YouTube site.

Especially for middle school and high school teachers, More:

13 Comments | History, Physics, Research, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Highest powered LASER in the world – in Texas, naturally

August 15, 2008

Longhorns must be proud. This is really cool science.

The University of Texas is hosting an open house for the Petawatt Laser. The Petawatt Laser is the most powerful laser in the world, creating “power output of more than 2,000 times the output of all power plants in the United States. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts.)” The open house is August 28. (No, I didn’t get an invitation; Meg Gardiner’s husband got one.)

The laser is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun, but it only lasts for an instant, a 10th of a trillionth of a second (0.0000000000001 second).

Not me teach - I didnt shine that laser on your whiteboard. (Seriously - Dr. Todd Whitmire, University of Texas, operator of the Petawatt Laser)

'Not me teach - I didn't shine that laser on your whiteboard.' (Seriously - Dr. Todd Ditmire, University of Texas, operator of the Petawatt Laser)

The laser reached greater than one petawatt of output in a test run March 31, 2008, at the University of Texas’s Texas Center for High Intensity Laser Science. The instrument will be used to create and study in extreme conditions, “including gases at temperatures greater than those in the sun and solids at pressures of many billions of atmospheres.”

This will allow them to explore many astronomical phenomena in miniature. They will create mini-supernovas, tabletop stars and very high-density plasmas that mimic exotic stellar objects known as brown dwarfs.

“We can learn about these large astronomical objects from tiny reactions in the lab because of the similarity of the mathematical equations that describe the events,” said Ditmire, director of the center.

Such a powerful laser will also allow them to study advanced ideas for creating energy by controlled fusion.

The Texas Petawatt was built with funding provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the U. S. Department of Energy.

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub could use a petawatt laser, to keep the water in the tub warm, don’t you think?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Lying for a Living.

Resources (just for the sake of listing “ultrafast science”):

Bonus: Flag etiquette violation, below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Physics, Research, Science, Technology, Texas | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell