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Peter Steinberg | USLHC | USA

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The Divided Self & The Examined Life: LHC Style

I mean, life’s tough enough when three experiments have a piece of you, but now I’ve committed myself to two physics blogs (that’s the “divided self” part — and William James looking at you from the right). As I did when I started working on Quantum Diaries (now defunct, but oddly still present — I just had dinner with Caolionn yesterday out here at BNL), I have tried to come up with a few rules:

  • Anything to do with ATLAS, US-ATLAS (the US component of the ATLAS experiment, for those arriving directly), CERN, trips to CERN, Europe, trips to Europe, and why the heavy ion program at the LHC will be an excellent complement to the continuing program at RHIC, will go here.
  • Everything else (New York, culture, amusing, frightening, quasi-personal, etc.) will land in my normal blog Entropy Bound.

That said, as life continues to speed up (all this and I’m getting married in 3 weeks), the conservation rules I discovered for myself years ago continue to hold. The obvious one is based on the Principle of Finite Time:

Life + Blogging = Const.

    Then again, the quality and quantity of well-remembered, fully-internalized time increases proportionally to the quantity and quality of blogging (no functional form, yet, though, although I do have Socrates glaring at you from the left, EXAMININ UR LIFE). So I have competing incentives. So it goes.

    Anyway, this should be an exciting year leading up to the May 2008 startup of the LHC. My personal angle will be slightly different than the others, with physics interests anchored in nuclear physics and the understanding of the quark-gluon plasma, pioneered by the RHIC program at BNL. So there’s a lot of LHC physics to ponder, even beyond the exciting discussions of the Higgs, Supersymmetry and extra dimensions. Heck, some of us have been wondering about how extra dimensions apply to existing experimental data for a few years now! How lucky we are to have a huge jump in energy to keep testing these ideas on even more data.
    In any case, glad to have you with us.

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