UCSD-TV Blog

First of all, we are grateful for Matt LeBourgeois who recorded all this unique and singular footage, more of which you will see in UCSDTV’s chronicle of his and Vivek Sharma’s experiences during the first year of the Higgs search. Matt got it good, where the rest of the media can’t….

Just moments after the first 7TeV proton collision ever recorded occurs in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector – for which Vivek directs the Higgs search, Matt caught Vivek’s comments as the first record of the event appeared.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that the big press event has subsided, and the terms LHC, CERN and Geneva fade as our attentions are prodded to such things as Ricky Martin’s personal life, the economic recovery and improving relations with China (unless you’re Google)-all issues with varying degrees of import; the real work for thousands of scientists begins. As Vivek so prosaically put just moments after viewing the record of the very first 7TeV proton collisions ever created “…the events are beautiful, the detector is working like a dream….you know, it’s taken twenty, twenty-five years to build and this is what it is for, finally, the baby is delivered, now it has to grow…”.

And they are quickly exhorting their baby to take its steps and grow. Shortly after the champagne corks were gathered up and the press hit “send” to file their media, Vivek’s cohorts in this huge endeavor slowly, or not so slowly, started putting the pedal to the metal. Still basking in the excitement, Vivek hints at what the next steps for their baby would be:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And as later reported by Vivek, on the very same day the CMS recorded more than 500,000 p-p (proton-proton) collisions in just a few hours. And on Wednesday and Thursday of this auspicious week, they accumulated more than four million collisions at 7TeV, with plans to increase the collision rate by orders of magnitude in the next weeks. Baby steps indeed….

So just what are we looking at in this video? Vivek explains in response to a presumably UK journalist:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their baby – our baby – has started the marathon, and we’ll be pacing alongside with Vivek and Matt. Keep checking back, and don’t forget to use your iPhones and browsers to take a peek at LHC status, and in a way, take part, however vicariously, as we venture on into this new epoch of understanding that started just a few days ago.

These are the first things I looked at when I awoke this morning

Apologies folks, but I can’t resist the tendency to the poetic. It’s an irresistible force. Yes, they look like hieroglyphs, or something truly alien, or perhaps just colorful scribbles, and it is certain the naysayers and luddites will proffer a plethora of snarky remarks. And in all honesty, I could tell you very little about what the traces show – but for one thing.

These are a record of something utterly new, heretofore unknown, and never before seen in the entire history of what we collectively call ourselves – the human race.

We are truly at the dawn of a new era. Not just for physics, but perhaps for everything we understand.

How can one make such a bold, perhaps foolhardy statement?

Keep in mind a passel of physicists with tons of graphite in a field house at the University of Chicago some 60-odd years ago. Or even earlier in the 1850′s, when an English tinkerer moved a magnet over some coiled wire. Those are just a couple of things that changed the world forever – and made our world what it is.

Now we – humanity – are looking deep into the pieces of the bits of shards of atoms and beyond into who-knows-where. Just like Fermi at Pile 1 and Faraday in his study, and all the rest who knew not what they were looking at, except that what they were looking at was new.

So the statement is not so bold, or foolhardy. It is in fact, certainty.

UCSD-TV will be chronicling the advent of this journey as we provide a unique perspective through the exploits of UCSD Professor of Physics Vivek Sharma and his graduate student, Matt LeBourgeois. Here is a preview of material we recorded just days before the start of the journey.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More will be coming as the collisions continue and the journey proceeds.

You can follow along with near real-time views of LHC and CMS status, as well as see collision images here. You can even put it on your iPhone….like, as my daughter is apt to remind me, the “inner” (or some might say not-so-inner) nerd in me did…

Another interesting blog to glimpse a different perspective of the journey is here, provided by CMS e-commentators Darin Acosta, Dave Barney and Lindsey Gray. A lot of it may as well be runes or Sanskrit to most of us – we’ll work on translating as much of it as we can as this project evolves, but I’m fascinated by it because it is a unique chronicle of what is a wholly new, and certain to be, fantastic journey.