Day 3 -- The sun comes out

The sun came out and I was called out of a session, so I took advantage of the sunshine, after three days of grey and drizzle, to see the outdoor booths set up all around the buildings in the Carlsberg complex, here. In fact, in conjunction with this main festival of science, the city of Copenhagen is hosting a "Science in the City" fair here and all over the city. Here's what I saw:

image The point of this 3-D printed head is to create better devices -- eg. hearing aids. Several 3-D printers on display.

Here's my favorite:

imageThey are working on a "family" solar car. Not sure how a family will fit in here, but I definitely hope to drive one one day.

Also scientists improving beer technology and growing meat in the lab.

Also went to a talk by CERN people. In a tweet: "Found the Higgs, starting up again, still relevant." In fact, there are experiments besides the two that identified Higgs, and these are still looking for answers. A talk about "spin-offs" reminded me at first of the old NASA PR that pointed out teflon and Tang as the practical results of the space program. But, it seems that the accelerator and information technology they have come up with has made its way into places like hospitals (in the thousands) and can improve cancer detection and targeting radiation. Unfortunately, saying we need to produce many more Higgs particles in order to study them is not quite as exciting as actually finding them in the first place.

More like this

A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note…
"We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn't expect it to have something to do with physical reality." -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism Might as well make this entire week "Higgs week" here on Starts With A Bang,…
"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring." -David Halberstam It was only a few months ago that both collaborations at the Large…
"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think.…