Here Come Gustav and the LHC!

Bought lots of water and batteries and gasoline today as Gustav makes its way somewhere toward the Gulf Coast. Most models show it hitting Louisiana, but what it does after that may bring a lot of rain to Houston. Houston floods very easily, being flat as a pancake.

A great site for following tropical weather is here. I've really gotten into it, watching the updated computer models as they change over time.

I guess one of the biggest stories in science these days is the eminent startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. This accelerator will reach energies high enough to see the remaining particle needed to make the Standard Model make sense, the Higgs boson, with a mass of maybe around 250 GeV. I'll have much more to say about this later. For now, you can follow the countdown to LHC startup at this link. It is scheduled to begin running on September 10. Of course, months or years of data collection will be required before any new physics can be seen with confidence.

Have a great week,
Tom

Here We Go

I'm not quite sure why I started this blog - we'll just see where it goes from here. For now, here's a picture of our cat, Zeke:

I'm a (geo)physicist, and I'm sure a lot of this blog will consist of my thoughts on, and links to, current research in physics and cosmology.


That's all for now,

Tom