Blogs, Twitter and YouTube

You can follow the progress of the LHC and interact with the physicists by using twitter and YouTube and the Quantum diaries web site.

http://www.twitter.com/cern  

http://www.youtube.com/cern

and also at http://www.cern.ch/bulletin

In addition the Quantum diaries web site allows you to follow physicists as they chronicle their lives.

http://www.quantumdiaries.org

Writing in multiple languages, scientists and students from universities and laboratories in North America, Asia and Europe have volunteered to blog about their latest research findings and challenges that face them in their labs, as well as their families, hobbies, and interests at home. Every few months, new diarists will join the site to share even more stories about life in the laboratory and beyond.

In a March 28 posting to Quantum Diaries, for example, Zoe Louise Matthews, a British graduate student, described the driving force behind her research at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics research in Geneva, Switzerland.

"In all our differences, we have in common those days where an unresolved problem is like a thirst, and we put the rest of our lives on hold until we can quench it," Matthews wrote. "We share the need for answers, the need to understand."

In the United States, Fermilab physicist Rob Kutschke will provide ongoing updates about a proposal for a new experiment. "Our quest is to look for a very rare decay of an elementary particle named a muon," he wrote on March 31. "Why are we doing this? It's the quantum mechanical equivalent of taking the short-cut through the woods to Grandma's house."

From the opposite side of the globe, writing in English and Japanese, physicist Junpei Fujimoto traced the origins of modern physics.

"Physics consists of two steps: quantify the phenomena and book numbers and analyse the structure behind the numbers," he wrote on March 30. "In the sixteenth century, Tycho Brahe accumulated data on the movement of Mars for 16 years. With this data, Johannes Kepler got 'Three Laws of Planetary Motion.' Kepler's insight from the data to the laws was marvelous, which led to Isaac Newton's theory of gravity."