Guardian has cool ‘Cern’ feature… still can’t figure out capital letters
07Jul08
The good folks at the Guardian have put together a nice interactive presentation about the LHC. Unfortunately, they continue to deny that ‘CERN’ is an acronym by spelling it as ‘Cern.’ [edit:see comments.] If you’re willing to forgive their editor, the presentation is a really nice introduction for non-physicists.
Filed under: Just for Fun | 6 Comments
Flip Tomato
I'm a postgraduate, expatriate physics student. RSS Feed.
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An American Physics Student in England 
Nice blog. A pedantic point, though: several newspapers (I can’t remember if the Guardian is one) cap down acronyms that are pronounced as single words – such as Nato, or Peta. Full caps are reserved for the likes of IRS and GCHQ.
Aaah — that explains it. Thanks. Why do certain organizations get capital letters while others don’t?
Maybe the acronyms which are pronounced as words are ‘cap’ed down’ and the acronyms which are spelled-out when spoken are a string of all-caps. Just a guess…
Although they seem to think the protons will collide “at nearly twice the speed of light”!
Well, aren’t they?
Riding a random proton in proton bundle A, what is the speed that protons of bundle B ”seem” to have?
If Speeds added like Newton thought ( v_AB = v_A + v_B ) then we would have plenty of evidence of particle moving faster than light. Experimentally, this is not so. So in 1905, Einstein proposed to preserve most of physics and have it be compatible with Maxwell’s equations, that the relationship should be: v_AB = (v_A + v_B)/(1 + v_A v_B/c^2)
Speed of proton A in the lab frame: v_A = c – d_A (a small bit less than c, the speed of light)
Speed of proton B in the lab frame: v_B = c – d_B
Speed of proton A as seen by B for a head-on collision: v_AB = (v_A + v_B)/(1 + v_A v_B/c^2) = c(2 – d_A/c – d_B/c)/(2 – d_A/c – d_B/c + d_A d_B/c^2) which is approximately c – d_A d_B/(2 c) when d_A/c and d_B/c are small.