<Movie guy voice>In a world where movies are more important than reality comes one company not afraid to speak out…</Movie guy voice>
Seriously, very cool vid featuring my buddy Brian Cox who gives us a tour of the Large Hadron Collider. Some (stuffy) folks think this kind of thing is a bad idea, sexifying science. Those people are dumb. This stuff is great!
P.S. Brian’s fab wife Gia has a post talking about his upcoming appearance on the BBC show "Horizon".
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The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
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January 17th, 2008 at 10:35 am
“Those people are dumb.”
Short, sweet and to the point. One of the finest applications of Occam’s Razor I’ve ever seen.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Very cool video. And yes, science IS hella sexy.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Brian Cox: all that and brains too. If science needs to be sexified, he’s a good guy to do it. ;^)
January 17th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Great! Thanks for the post. My AST 101 class would probably like this.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:06 am
One of my best friends is working at the LHC right now. He has a lot of exciting stories about it.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Very cool! I’d like to see more from him. I think he’s a very good presenter (almost as good as the Bad Astronomer).
Phil, books are great, but maybe you should have a TV show too. When will we see you on a pneumatic lift with a hard had showing us the innards of the telescopes at Haleakala?
January 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
PsyberDave, let’s just say that has occurred to me, too. I’m always on the lookout for something like that.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Thanks for the vid link, it was very enjoyable…and passed along to the non-scientists I know. (And a few physicists and materials people too.)
One thing I’ve never understood is the derision on the part of some in the science community who think that presenting science in a way that common folks can get their head around the idea if not the concepts is a bad thing. Sure, the minutae is missing, but it does help generate support from the folks that just don’t understand without it. And best of all, it excites young folks to get their training and be the discoverers of the future.
I can remember when I was young and I’d see Carl Sagan on TV when Cosmos originally aired. The ideas he conveyed so well got me thinking, which got me interested, which got me reading and when I ran into “thicker” texts (with math beyond my training) it spurred me on in school. It wasn’t many years later that those chops came in handy with university classes like P-Chem, etc. Carl, Richard Feynman and others are now teachers I never met personally but have to thank for a rewarding career.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I wish that these wonderful bright scientists, would understand the difference between theory and hypothesis. They are spouting on about unproven ideas as theories. Until you build, in this case, a very impressive instrument and consume a huge amount of electricity doing experiments to collect data that either supports or does not support your hypothesis’ predictions there are no theories possible.
Theory is built upon tested hypothesis!
The word itself says it all… “hypo” thesis. “Hypo” = low, under, beneath, down.
Science gets in big trouble when these two distinct words are interchanged!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
They are playing with fire on a massive scale.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[...] Sådan kan man skabe interesse for naturvidenskab; fascination, begejstring og en god histore. [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] god, real sci-fi, theoretical physics, videos Just came across this very amusing video via the Bad Astronomer. The Large Hadron Collider is one of those things that could produce some amazing science, but [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Thomas,
When I was in grad school we used the word theory to mean a collection of ideas and hypotheses. We made the distinction between hypothesis and theory in the sense that a hypothesis was a testable (hopefully) claim or guess while a theory was a coherent collection of those claims. It did not require the hypotheses to be previously tested. I think my usage is a common concept of “theory” among scientists. Indeed, a lot of “theories” are heavily weighted with hypotheses that have not yet been confirmed. In the field of theoretical physics, their theories are sometimes far beyond what has been observed so far. Those coherent collections of ideas are still regarded as theories even though it may be many years before anyone is able to test them.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Don’t worry they have studied it and the chances of a disaster is small. However, the chance they could make some pretty big honkin’ new bombs with the new technologies they will be able to develop is large. But we will need them to wipe out the grey nano goo the AI machine create to clean up CO2.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
[...] (via BadAstronomy) [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
In my opinion, the best part of the video is the scientists being excited about the opportunity to be proven wrong, and thereby forced into unknown trerritory.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Brian Cox is possibly my favourite scientist in the world (sorry Phil), but last time he was on Horizon it was a disaster. It wasn’t his fault, but Horizon has been so dumbed down and so sensationalised that it’s painful to watch.
The show was ostensibly about the LHC and the search for the Higgs boson, but in an hour long programme it never even used the word boson and the Higgs particle+field wasn’t mentioned until the last ten minutes. The bulk of the show was taken up with a completely superfluous history of the universe, and it started (of course, being Horizon) with a dramatic and fact free section on how the hoped for mini black holes might destroy the Earth. Worst of all, Cox was presented wearing a black polo neck against a black background, so he looked like a lame mime artist.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Vince Noir, Brian Cox. Are they related? I think we should be told…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uzoRl092U0
On a sightly more depressing note: Horizon – urgh. I grew up on a hearty diet of Doctor Who, Horizon and Tomorrow’s World, back in the day when it was still obvious which was fiction. It’s criminal, the state of science reporting over here, and especially galling when it’s the publicly funded BBC. Lord Reith must be powering Alexandria Palace at his current RPM.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Brian Cox and his colleagues are proving my theory correct – the early universe is British and has been accelerating toward being French for at least 13 billion years. (Kiddng!) But seriously – this is very exciting.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I’ve been asked by several people about the chance of the LHC generating black holes which will devour Earth. Is there a Dr. Krone employed at CERN?
January 17th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
You mean science isn’t sexy? Take LHC, CERN, Fermilab, TRIUMF in canada, and the neutrino observatory in sudbury – this is some of the biggest modern construction being undertaken. The egyptians built pyramids, we build instruments.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
>Some (stuffy) folks think this kind of thing is a bad idea,
>sexifying science.
Um, science =is= sexy! Just ask Kinsey! ~_^
Seriously, this is a huge jump in the study of particle physics. I’m excited about it!
January 17th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
His “fab wife”? Darn.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Paul Anderson, I agree with you and I have one to add to your list. Super-Kamiokande. The Japanese have yet again made something both functional and beautiful.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
“In my opinion, the best part of the video is the scientists being excited about the opportunity to be proven wrong, and thereby forced into unknown trerritory.”
I liked that part too.
To me, that’s what makes science superior. It’s not afraid to admit an idea is wrong (with the right evidence of course), and is not afraid to try a new and totally different path.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
[...] the lovely Phil at BadAstronomy.com, comes this wonderful CERN video tour of the Large Hadron [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Is the LHC CERN’s version of what the SSC was supposed to be?
January 17th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Mark,
You could say that. The SSC was going to be significantly larger, and attain much greater collision energies & luminosities. But part of the reason why Congress was in a position to cancel the SSC is that the LHC was also under development at that time. Since that Fermilab was already doing the same sort of research, and the LHC was getting funding of its own, it was expedient to just cancel the project.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
[...] a h/t to Phil Plait. fun science controversyPopularity: unranked [?] SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: “Framing not [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Does anyone know a good semi-technical explanation of just what the Higgs is, and what just how it is supposed to do what it does?
January 18th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Max Fagin says: “Does anyone know a good semi-technical explanation of just what the Higgs is, and what just how it is supposed to do what it does?”
Excellent question, and just the one I was about to ask.
Doing a quick wiki-search, it appears to be the boson that gives mass to matter. Does that mean it’s the graviton? Any particle physicists care to enlighten?
- Jack
January 18th, 2008 at 1:01 am
The graviton would be a boson, but not the Higgs. A graviton would be massless, whereas the Higgs would be extremely massive (as particles go). The key here is that mass = inertia, and a particle’s coupling with the Higgs (or, as it turns out, any other kind of particle) exerts a kind of drag which yields behavior identical to what we identify with inertia (mass).
Here is an excellent explanation of the Higgs mechanism, in accurate but familiar terms: http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~djm/higgsa.html
January 18th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Mark Martin says: “Here is an excellent explanation of the Higgs mechanism, in accurate but familiar terms”
Thank you. That is exactly the level of explanation I was looking for. You just prevented me from making an embarrassing mistake in print! I mean real print, as in ink-on-paper.
- Jack
January 18th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Awesome vid, I have to pass it along to my friend who works at DESY. And I just love Brian Cox’ accent, which makes the science even more sexy
January 18th, 2008 at 9:46 am
There’s an excellent films explaning, with a visual demonstration, what the Higgs is at http://www.labreporter.com (made by the same people who made the Brian Cox film).
January 18th, 2008 at 9:47 am
There’s an excellent films explaining, with the aid of a strong visual analogy, what the Higgs is at http://www.labreporter.com (made by the same people who made the Brian Cox film).
January 19th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Is there a law that all movie trailers have to begin with “In a world…”?
January 21st, 2008 at 8:18 am
Paul Anderson and Mena, here’s another for the list:
ITER.
Ten. million. Celsius.*
Wow.
* note: figures not checked for accuracy.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Just in case anyone hasn’t noticed the Horizon program is on BBC 2 at 9pm tonight, Tuesday the 29th of Jan 2008. All the family will be gathered round.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:45 am
It was actually a pretty good show, if understandably simplified. It was all Cox, so to speak, rather than having an anonymous narrator and interviews with him and other scientists. In that respect it was closer to the excellent Atom series presented by Jim Al-Khalili than a typical Horizon. I can’t say I learned much new from it, but it was cool to see LIGO and the double galaxy image from Kitt Peak.
Horizon would be much better if it stuck with this style, using scientists’ natural enthusiasm for their subject to convey its interest rather than trying to sensationalise everything while minimising the science.