This past week saw two big milestones for the two big operating high energy particle colliders in the world. At these machines, we measure the number of collisions with the rather arcane unit of “inverse barns”, which is essentially a measure of inverse cross sectional area. It’s just like if you are throwing darts at a dart board across the room with your eyes closed: the bigger the dart board, the more likely you are to hit it, and the more darts you throw, the more hits you get.

The term “barn” came from the early days of nuclear physics when Fermi quipped that a nucleus is “as big as a barn.” And so a new physics unit was born: one barn is 10^-28 m², about the size of a big nucleus. At the Tevatron at Fermilab, we’ve just crossed over 10.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity, after over ten years of operation in what we call Run 2 of the Tevatron. At the LHC at CERN, we just saw the integrated luminosity counter roll over to 1.000 inverse femtobarns. It’s kind of like the difference between your 10-year old car rolling over to 100,000 miles, and your new year-old car rolling over to 10,000 miles.

Our old car, the Tevatron, has taken us on quite a ride this past decade. I’ll push the analogy further, though, and say that it’s been like driving across the Great Plains. We kept hoping to see mountains, but it’s been flatland the whole way. Though we’ve looked very hard, we just have not turned up any sign of new physics at this incredible machine, despite the recent excitement. The present schedule is that the Tevatron will collide its last proton and antiproton at 2:00 pm on September 30 of this year. We’re tradin’ her in.

With our new car, the LHC, expect to see the mountains very soon, and in fact we reached this amount of data far sooner than I would have predicted at the beginning of the year. Last year, starting in March and eventually stopping in early November, the LHC delivered 0.04 inverse femtobarns, 25 times less than the sample we have now. But that was the first good chunk of physics data, and an army of data-hungry students, postdocs, lab scientists and professors analyzed it frantically over the winter, publishing a huge torrent of papers in the spring as the LHC really started to hit the gas. (Okay, perhaps the analogy is stretching to the breaking point here.)

So are the white things on the horizon we are starting to see the snow-capped peaks we have hoped for, or just clouds? We’ll soon know, and this is bound to be a summer to remember in the history of particle physics, unlike any time since the “November Revolution” of 1974, when the charm quark and the tau lepton made their appearance at the Stanford Linear Accelerator and Brookhaven National Lab.

After the November Revolution, with the third generation of quarks and leptons established, the Standard Model took solid form: there soon followed the discovery of the bottom quark at Fermilab in 1977, the gluon at DESY in Hamburg in 1979, and the W and Z bosons at CERN in 1982. The hunt for the top quark and the Higgs boson, and whatever might lie beyond, was on.

But it took another thirteen years to find the top quark, and in 1995, the CDF and D0 experiments did just that at the Tevatron. It was clear as a bell, and surprisingly massive, weighing in at nearly the mass of a gold atom at 175 GeV. With the precise measurements of the W and Z from CERN it soon became clear that the Higgs might just lie within reach of the Tevatron, which could discover it before the LHC could be completed. (The SSC had been cancelled in 1993 in a budget climate eerily like our own.)

And so Run 2 of the Tevatron began in 2001 after major upgrades to both experiments. Slow at first, the accelerator luminosity steadily increased, and the physics flowed, with better and better measurements of the top quark and W boson, and searches for the Higgs and a host of other hypothetical particles. Two years ago the Tevatron experiments finally reached the level where, combined, the data from CDF and D0 ruled out the HIggs boson if its mass were twice that of the W boson, 160 GeV. But no sign of any new particles.

The data from the LHC in 2010 was not sufficient to improve upon this Higgs search result. In a wide swath of other physics studies, however, the LHC is surpassing the Tevatron. Basically, the LHC should be viewed as a gluon collider: a gluon in one incoming proton collides with a gluon from another, producing whatever gluons produce when they do this, which is anything that is strongly interacting (that is, feels the strong nuclear force). Even with over a factor of a hundred less integrated luminosity, the LHC can do far more than the Tevatron due to the LHC’s higher energy. But at the LHC as well, last year, there was no sign of new physics.

In the coming weeks, though, with the huge new data set, the LHC will blow past the Tevatron in nearly every category except in the search for the low mass Higgs boson, where there truly still is a race. There are two big conferences coming up at the end of July, in Boston and Grenoble, France, at which we can expect the announcements of any discoveries made by the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS…or by the Tevatron. Fasten your seat belts!

Tony Piro, the artist behind the webcomic Calamities of Nature, explains the relationship between science and the supernatural better than I ever could.

Click for the rest of the exciting story. Via Evolving Thoughts.

Top picks

“There is little validity to concerns that people who use social networks experience smaller social networks, less closeness, or are exposed to less diversity.” Pew kicks the echo-chamber meme in the groin with the steel-capped boot of data.

“Gathered inside a little-known research centre in southern Louisiana, the people who oversee chimpanzee research in the United States were preparing to battle for the survival of their enterprise.” Meanwhile, an editorial sums up the current debate

No heartbeat. No pulse. But very much alive. The artificial heart that doesn’t beat

“Something happened! Sehwag is out! We’re not sure why.” Two Americans who know nowt about cricket live-blog a full game. Pure genius.

Genome study solves twins’ mystery condition. Great piece by Erika Check Hayden

Liu Bolin, the camouflage man. These photos are just ridiculous. And continuing the theme, “Turning the human form into background noise” – awesome profile of a master of camouflage

“So do we over-vilify invasive species? No, we don’t.” An excellent riposte by Christie Wilcox

You may have heard about blind people who can use sonar like bats. But you’ve never read anything this good about it

“Again and again, [Stephen Jay] Gould ...

You can watch the full 7 minute segment here. It came out great. I’m trying to figure out how to embed it…ah ha!

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

By Jon Winsor

One of the most surprising things about the Santorum interview on Limbaugh last week was how completely unsurprising it was. Here’s Santorum’s take on climate science:

There’s a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It’s been on a warming trend so they said, “Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer,” just like they did in the seventies when it was getting cool, they needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it’s getting cooler. It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life…

Got that? Scientists (who we can assume are included under what Santorum means by “the left”) are secretly “concocting” the science, because they want government to “control your life.” Obviously, this is not much of a scientific argument. But it’s a very recognizable political argument, and the kind we hear repeatedly. And some of us may remember the early 80’s when it was a new argument, at least in the mass-circulated form that we we see it in today. I would argue that the person most responsible for putting that argument into circulation was Irving Kristol. In 1975, he wrote:

[The] “new class” consists of scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors, etc.-a substantial number of whom find their careers in the expanding public sector rather than the private. The public sector, indeed, is where they prefer to be. They are, as one says, “idealistic”-i.e., far less interested in individual financial rewards than in the corporate power of their class. Though they continue to speak the language of “Progressive-reform,” in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call “the welfare state” toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.

This is primarily an emotional argument–as has become more and more clear over the years. Not only does it have nothing to do with the merits of specific claims and arguments (especially the merits of climate science), but Irving Kristol and his left-leaning colleague Daniel Bell turned out to be quite wrong in their predictions about the counter culture and what would happen to the welfare state as baby boomers entered the professions.

But even though the predictions about the “new class” turned out wrong, as a set of ideas they’ve had a wildly successful career, and even continue to have success. The reasons why are many:

• Politically, this kind of argument can draw on the cultural resentments of everyone who isn’t an expert, and also draw on the strong force of US anti-intellectualism. As Amanda Marcotte put it a couple years ago, a politician (like Santorum) can use this style of argument to pick up “the spite vote.”
• They could trade on fears of the counterculture, which were strong back in 1975 when Kristol was making his case, but has lessened now that the counterculture sells everything from running sneakers to Cadillacs (although images of the counterculture still have power to motivate the GOP base when the culture wars are invoked).
• They built on the demonstrated success of Nixon’s strategy of stoking resentments: against intellectuals, the press, and all the snooty types who would oppose underdogs like Nixon (Americans love an underdog, which the conservative counterestablishment knows all too well).
• It rang alarm bells for the donor class for conservative institutions, urging them to respond to the new proliferation of experts and help create their own network of counter-expertise (a favorite subject of Chris’s lately).
• It piggybacked on previous conservative intellectuals’ work. See William F. Buckley on “the liberal establishment” and James Burnham on the “managerial elite.”
• It allowed Kristol’s cohort of conservative intellectuals to mine all the brilliant content of the anti-bohemian and anti-communist feuds among the New York intellectuals, so they could fight the intellectual skirmishes they needed to fight to get establishment respect. The work of Daniel Bell alone is rich enough to spend decades unpacking (even though, again, he got many of his predictions wrong).
• Most of all, Kristol’s formula of cultural class struggle against “elitist big government” made coordinated messaging easy. Even Sarah Palin can rail in favor of the “real Americans” and against the “elites.” And we can hear Kristol’s formula broadcast in stereo from Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the candidates themselves. (Everyone all together now: “John Kerry is a French elitist.” “Barack Obama is a socialist!” Or, “This climategate thing is BIG!!” If enough people say so at the same time, there must be something to it, right?)

Of course, these days there are almost no socialists left (except maybe Bernie Sanders), and the counterculture is starting to exist only late at night on Nickolodean. So the only people left to fight are the “intellectuals” (Irving Kristol’s “scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators… etc.”) This has become very worrying to smart conservatives such as David Frum and David Brooks because if conservatives oppose everyone that Kristol classified as “new class” intellectuals, they start to oppose expert competence itself.

But The Weekly Standard is having none of this:

Kristol would not brook being lectured to by thinkers feigning a concern for conservatism and shedding crocodile tears over its fall from a dignified version limited to quoting maxims from Edmund Burke. This group of salon intellectuals, still active today, would, in the name of “saving” conservatism, exclude from it people of faith because they are too religious, entrepreneurs because they wish to make too much money, and middle Americans because they are too patriotic. While Kristol acknowledged the dangers of populism, he also saw that it can be a “corrective to the defects . . . often arising from the intellectual influence . . . of our democratic elites.” Calling attention to a new fact of modern political life, he noted that the “people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological elites, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal.”

Having policy informed by science–”utopian?” Is it something only “salon intellectuals” need to worry about? The Weekly Standard’s reviewer skates very fast over this territory because he’s on thin ice.

Last week, I showed you a turtle doing his thing while I was out biking — providing "his thing" means falling face-first off a log.

Not too long after that, a ways farther down the trail, I had an encounter with a much cuter critter.

That’s a prairie dog, and they’re very common around Boulder. They are about as adorable as you can imagine, even in the way they behave. They stand on their hind legs, chitter loudly, and run around like they’re starring in a Pixar cartoon.

On the other hand, they also are known to carry the plague. And by the plague, I mean the plague, Bubonic Plague. That’s one reason I try not to get too close to them. I watched "Holy Grail"; I know the score.

Colonies of them can have dozens of members, and watching them prance around and run from hole to hole is fun. Their noises are interesting; some folks think it may be a very rudimentary language. I remain agnostic on this, though of course skeptical, but they are a very gregarious and chatty animal.

And, of course, ...

Here, for your viewing pleasure (I hope), is my recent talk about time and viruses, at the Long Now Foundation. I turn up after a short video, and then after the lecture Stewart Brand and I have a fun conversation about how viruses will not infect you with superpowers.