Anyone wondering what today’s Google logo was all about: first beams at the Large Hadron Collider. Cosmic Variance was live-blogging the startup, making for some tense internetting lasting almost 5 hours. There were no collisions today, but a full beam of protons was successfully sent around the monstrous machine, officially marking the beginning of operations for the LHC. This is exciting!

1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

I love the internet!

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

Nick Laird in The Guardian on merging science with poetry:

How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms. What we do have is domestic analogies, and poems that reference outer space tend to tell us more about inner space – ourselves – than anything about the cosmos.

Any description of the deep underpinnings of science is likely to border on poetry or prose. As Laird says, the facts of the universe are so beyond our imagination that analogies are necessary to explain the world in anything but math. Thus any attempt to put the truth in layman’s terms is an attempt at poetry.

Also, Laird reminded me of perhaps my favorite two lines ever put together from the English language:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

(via Alexander Pope)

Molecule of the Day presents: L-Methamphetamine.

L-methamphetamine…is found in Vicks Vapor Inhalers. … This is the mirror image of D-methamphetamine – the street drug.

The thing is, L-methamphetamine isn’t really anything like the D-methamphetamine isomer that is found in street drugs. D-methamphetamine is psychoactive, while L-methamphetamine isn’t very psychoactive at all. In certain receptor and enzyme pockets where D-methamphetamine fits, L-methamphetamine fits like a left foot in a right shoe.

This is a post from 2006! That is to say: fromthearchives. Get used to it, the internet is being boring.

I first (roundaboutly) mentioned Karl Friston’s “unified theory of the brain” back in January. Now it is half a year later, and I still cannot say I am any further in gleaning any great understanding from his paper. Thankfully, New Scientist sums it up for the layman in this week’s issue.

Although we know tons and tons of details about the brain, we are almost completely lacking in ideas of how to connect all those details. Similar situations existed in physics and biology before the likes of Einstein and Darwin (respectively), and Karl Friston is attempting to follow in their footsteps by describing a simple theory that explains a wide range of neuroscience phenomenon.

Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses. … Instead of estimating the distance to an object as a number, for instance, the brain would treat it as a range of possible values, some more likely than others.

Importantly, these predictions are ever evolving. Any new information the brain receives influences the predictions, constantly minimizing error whenever possible. However, describing the brain as a “probability machine” has involved a number of different approaches, all of which would need to be tied together to create an overarching unified theory.

The WorldWide Telescope has been released.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

Green Porno – a feverishly hilarious look at sex in the natural world. I am especially partial toward the spider shenanigans; who knew I had sex the same way as in the insect kingdom?

Nature reports on two new studies showing that young children navigate the world using different information than adults:

Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.

Children over the age of eight showed results similar to adults on tasks in which information was available from various senses. In one study, sight and touch were used, and adults performed worst when only able to use sight or touch, and best when able to use both. However, children under the age of eight performed no differently.

“The results suggest that children don’t integrate, but instead ‘alternate’ between sources of information, [says developmental cognitive psychologist Virginia Slaughter.]”

Psychosocial and other cognitive development have been shown (billions of times) to continue much after birth, so these results are nothing shocking. But still, it is always interesting (and useful) to have experiments show behavioral correlates to the neural underpinnings.

Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Galaxies Gone Wild! (via kottke)

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space 18 years ago and to celebrate, NASA has put up a photo gallery of merging galaxies, galaxies as in love with each other as NASA is with the Hubble. Aww.

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Update: Cosmic Variance has a very moving goodbye post by one of Wheeler’s graduate students and friend.

A BMW forum has a great set of photos of the space shuttle processing, from shipment of the external fuel tank to liftoff. (Why it’s the car forums that always have these cool stories, I do not know.) Reminds me of a more localized version of the trip a 200-ton piece of a particle detector took from Deggendorf, Germany, to a laboratory in Karlsruhe, only 400 kilometers away.