After a series of setbacks — some devastating, holding up the world’s largest scientific experiment for many months — this milestone achieved shows that the collider is heading back to full operations, which should get started again next year. There will be press conference about this on Monday November 23rd at 1:00 p.m. GMT, which will be webcast live.

And if you’re wondering what the crew at CERN think of this latest news, then take a look at this picture of them looking at the results of the start up:

That picture makes me smile. Those unemotional, cold, calculating scientists. Why can’t they ever reveal their true feelings?

You might think that’s an alien spore, or a crystal of some kind. But it’s actually what appears to be a rendering of a three-dimensional fractal!

Fractals are very interesting. There are different ways to describe one, but one way to think of one is that it’s a shape that looks the same no matter what magnification you use. You can double it, triple it, make it 10,876,432 times bigger, and the object still displays (more or less) the same features. The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot, and there is an entire subclass of fractals named after him. They are seen in nature (and art, like here) quite a bit. Coastlines are fractal, as are — seriously — some kinds of broccoli.

However, fractals are generally calculated in two dimensions. What’s new here is that the fractal pattern has now been calculated in three dimensions! That is, to say the least, a non-trivial procedure — I used to play with some of the 2D equations many years ago, on my old 512k Fat Mac, with code written in Pascal (yes, with the semicolons and everything) and it was fascinating if very complex.

But the 3D idea has been written up by Daniel White, who, along with others, figured out how to create and render such an incredible object. He even created a "fly-over" video to demonstrate the fractal pattern:

Wow. Even if the math of this makes no sense at all to you, the beauty of this should be apparent.

Which brings up a point: why are mathematical shapes beautiful? What makes them so pleasing to our eyes and brain; why did we evolve an appreciation for such things? I don’t know, and at some point I’ll have to research that a bit — understanding the principles behind this will help me appreciate it even more.

Tip of the fractionally dimension hat to Fark.

My fellow Hive Overmind blogger and astronomer Sean Carroll writes that it’s possible Fermi has done just this. The data are not conclusive, but very provocative nonetheless. He has the details.

But I can’t resist adding that on The Big Bang Theory a few weeks ago, Raj and Sheldon were investigating building a detector to look for this very type of dark matter. I wrote David Saltzberg, the science advisor (whom I met on the set last month when I was visiting LA; more on him and that at a later date) and told him this, and he noted that I was right. Well, how about that! It had to happen sometime. Now, to publish…

Ho hum.

But one very cool thing that happened was that while watching the taping of one of my favorite shows, "The Big Bang Theory", I met David Saltzberg. David’s a physicist and astronomer who has serious bona fides in science. All that is very cool and all, but most importantly as far as I’m concerned is that he is the official science consultant on BBT. This is basically my dream job, so I’m very jealous.

But not bitter, because David’s a great guy. We met up on the set and immediately started chatting and having fun. And to cement himself in my pantheon of Very Cool People, he gave me his copy of the script so I could follow along with the show. Whoa! [Bill Prady, the co-Executive Producer of the show, also gave me a copy of the script for my daughter; Bill and David are the ones in the picture, courtesy CBS, from a UCLA article interviewing David.]

When you watch the show, take a look at the whiteboards littering the character’s apartments and offices. They always show a barrage of equations, notes, and diagrams. Those are all real! Yup, David’s work. When Sheldon and Raj argue over dark matter detection, or Leonard spouts off a line about physics, the core science is from David’s brain.

In a very wise and fun move, David has started a blog tying the science in the episodes to what’s currently known in the field, using BBT as a springboard to explain real cutting-edge stuff. It’s called The Big Blog Theory (also available en Español), and is a great read. if you’re a fan of the show, and a total science nerd (and as I always point out, if you read my blog then congrats! You’re a nerd) then you should put Big Blog Theory on your must read list. It adds a dimension to the show that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible except through ten-dimensional matrix transformations of the standard general relativistic metric, and while those are trivial to do it’s a step you now don’t need to take.

This is pretty slick, and helpful; people (me included) tend to have a miserable sense of scale. If I had two wishes for this, it would be that they included a human hair, since that’s something of a standard for comparison to small things (a hair is 50 – 100 microns in diameter), and that they make the opposite one to zoom out from a coffee bean to the observable Universe. That would be pretty cool!

Note: Yes, of course I’ve seen "Powers of Ten". I remember the original, with Philip Morrison narrating. I used to sit in the Smithsonian on field trips when I was a kid and watch it over and over. I was always doomed to dorkhood.

The good news is Chris posted the official stream from the conference, and the video and audio quality are great! So here’s that video.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.

Speculation is a difficult thing to master, and far more difficult to control: when does speculation tread into the territory of nonsense, or jump too far in its suppositions? Yet without it, science is on a treadmill, going nowhere.

Happily, science does go somewhere. It goes everywhere! And best yet? It takes you with it.