The LHC

Sorry for my prolonged absence; as Barack Obama said on the Letterman show last night, we've entered the silly season of politics. All I could think of to write about was politics, and I didn't want to turn this into a political blog. So I just kept quiet. I'm in the process of revamping my website and hope to get back to blogging on a more regular basis.

But for today, anyway, I had to jump back into the action and give a shout-out to my husband, Tony Liss, and all of the other physicists involved in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN! Because, amidst the "lipstick on a pig" flap yesterday, the world learned that the LHC finally turned on. He and his colleagues at the U.I. were interviewed for an article in the local paper, "UI Team Takes Part in Worldwide Science Experiments," and they appeared on the local TV news stations. Even though they they won't begin collisions or taking data until October, it's still pretty exciting. Either they find the Higgs boson--which will be pretty cool--or they won't, which in its own way may be even more exciting, because physicists will be forced to re-evaluate their theories. And then there's the possibility of determining the nature of--drum roll, please--dark matter!

Stella Brite, the sequel. Yes?

Dark matter

I think it's not an overstatement to say that it's quite a challenge to explain dark matter to elementary school kids. To convey to kids the idea that something like 95% of the universe is this mysterious dark matter and dark energy, I used this:

That's right. The stuff that we can detect--you and I and the world, the stars and planets in the universe--are represented by the colored jelly beans. All the rest? Licorice jelly beans.

The guy at Art Mart was very helpful when I told him I wanted to buy a mixture that was 95% licorice and 5% colored. I told him it was a teaching aid and commented that it must be an unusual request.

"Oh, you'd be surprised," he said.