Ok, Silence may be golden, but this is a bit ridiculous. Truth is, right now I am back at MIT, busily teaching Electromagnetism to unsuspecting freshmen and upperclassmen who are onto me, giving presentations to Visiting Committees and preparing seminars which when scheduled had the promise of REAL BEAM DATA (see, you’re drooling too!) but now fall into the category of “what we can do with zillions of cosmic rays” – is is unfair to pooh pooh the 300 million events CMS just collected, which are very useful for us as a dry run, but it just isn’t the same.
Being back here while everyone else is at CERN means I am a virtual presence, attending meetings in my PJs with a cup of coffee at my computer at 7 AM via VOIP, or occasionally getting to work in time to join by real video conference. There was a surreal moment last week when Josh showed up using his laptop onboard camera:
No, he’s not from Australia – he claims he needs to recompile the Linux Kernel to get the camera to uninvert, but still, it is pretty strange to see such a thing so early in the morning.
Actually, funny enough, there has been some noise about blogging from the CMS management – apparently they are very concerned about physicists disparaging physicists, or “leaks” about LHC or about new results. Now, I understand the concerns, but to me it also borders on censorship, and we professors feel pretty strongly about our intellectual freedom – anyway, maybe that is another reason for my lack of spouting off, but anyone who is worried about that ought to have a look at my second blog entry– it isn’t a real result unless it is in a peer reviewed journal.
So, I will continue to blog but if I make anybody angry, let me know and we can discuss. Discussion is good – sometimes I’ve had some pretty vigorous and loud ones, and usually I find all participants learn something (unless they are my 11 year old, who decides he isn’t going to learn anything even if it kills him which happens more often than I’d like).
