Physicists rock!

The current lineup of Fermilab's Drug Sniffing Dogs is one of many incarnations of a band that has been evolving for 20 years. Photos: Fred Ullrich, Fermilab

Wherever physics goes, music follows, from the lyrical strains of flute and violin to Blue Wine, Les Horribles Cernettes and Drug Sniffing Dogs.

Standing on a stage near the border of France and Switzerland, the songwriter and keyboard player for Les Horribles Cernettes looks up at the sky and grimaces. So much for the annual free Hardronic Music Festival, he thinks. Thousands of physicists, engineers, technicians, and their families sit in a grassy field, far from any shelter, at CERN, the European particle physics center. The crowd got in free; they won't hesitate to leave, Silvano de Gennaro thinks. He sighs, and his fingers touch the first note of the song "Big Bang" just as buckets of rain start to fall.

People start moving -- but not to go home. Concertgoers pick up plastic chairs to shield their heads. Others alternate clapping to the beat and wiping rain out of their eyes.

Then water shorts out the lighting system. A bevy of upcoming special effects-heart-shaped balloons, bubbles, disco lights, smoke -- vanish into the darkness. Disappointed, de Gennaro gets ready to pack up.

A beam of light streaks across the stage, focuses on a musician and stops, followed by another, and another. People are pointing flashlights retrieved from their cars.

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--Tona Kunz

Wandering wild

AD's Wesley Mueller took this photo of a wild turkey near the old wire barn on Kautz Road, near Butterfield Road. Click on the photo to view a larger version.

Asking a judge to save the world, and maybe a whole lot more

From New York Times, March 30, 2008

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can't afford their mortgages and in some places now they can't even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth - and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely - though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world's physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a "strangelet" that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called "strange matter." Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years - namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

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Read the MSNBC story

LHC Safety information