Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I’ll be doing another live video live chat starting at 3:00 p.m. Mountain Time (21:00 UT) on Sunday May 4. I’ve been having some troubles of late with it, so I’m doing some fooling around with the software, but things should be working by Sunday. Check back here on on the blog Sunday shortly before 15:00 MT and I should have things working.

And have some questions ready!

In case my earlier video didn’t give you a sense of the scale of the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector, maybe this one will.

Holy cow. I stood right there, looked right into the heart of that beast, and even now watching that animation gives me chills. It was that cool.

One gold star to anyone who can name all the music used in the video, and another one for adding the composers’ names, too.

Well, it’s more of a skirmish, since it’s just the two of us.

He has more readers, but I own the skies. Dropping a rock or two on the ocean would decide this pretty easily.

But how will it all end? Come to TAM 6 and find out.

Tip o’ the battle helmet to HalfMooner at Skeptic Friends.

The whole reason Brian Cox invited me to CERN and to visit the Large Hadron Collider was to interview me for a podcast. Over the past few months he has been bringing people with different backgrounds to the LHC to get their impressions, and see it through their eyes. I was privileged to be among the last who got to go down underground before they turn the machine on!

So the interview Brian and I did while standing in front of CMS is now online. You can grab it directly here, or listen to it in context on the CERNPodcast page (with some cool photos Gia took). I had a lot of fun talking with Brian; we chatted over the physics of the LHC, and then the antiscience of people trying to shut it down, afraid it’ll create a black hole or two.

After listening to it, I think this is actually one of my better interviews, so I urge everyone to give it a listen. And if you haven’t, check out the video I took of LHC as well!

I have to add that Brian even invited over and interviewed John Barrowman — Capt. Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood! In fact, that interview is pretty funny, if you know Barrowman and Harkness… it gets a bit randy, too. And there’s video as well.

During my live chat last weekend, I got some great questions. One of those was "Where is the center of the Universe?" This is a question I get a lot when I give public talks, and it’s a tough one to answer. I give it a go here.

I’ll be doing another live chat this weekend (probably Sunday at 3:00 Mountain time again); check the blog here because I’ll post when I figure it out. I may change streaming sites; UStream clearly doesn’t like my set up. The video is choppy again.