The Muppets take on Queen
Here’s what happens when you combine two icons from the 70’s: Just the right amount of levity for this Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  Thanks to the late Freddie Mercury and Jim Henson for being so creative.

Thanksgiving
This year we give thanks for one of the bedrock principles of classical mechanics: conservation of momentum. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, and the Spin-Statistics Theorem.) There are analogous notions once we include relativity or quantum mechanics, but for our present purposes the version that

First Collisions in the LHC!
The LHC circulated two counter-rotating beams today, and a few hours ago the CMS experiment recorded its first collision event, shown in the display above. This is a fantastic milestone for the LHC and the experiments! (Sorry

Collisions!!!
We’ve been waiting decades for this and here it is - first collisions at the LHC!   WooHoo!  The ATLAS detector saw the first collision this afternoon, followed soon by CMS.  The machine was then tuned to give the LHCb and ALICE detectors collisions this evening, so all 4 experiments have had a taste of the fruit.  The machine energy is set to the injection energy, 450 GeV per beam, which is a very safe way to start.  They expect to ramp up to 1.2 TeV per beam to achieve the world’s highest energy collisions just before Christmas. Here is the event display for the first collision in CMS:  

Wechsler’s Index
My last 10 days (posted after a recovery weekend), by the numbers: Shuttle launches witnessed: 1 Shuttle launches since 1981: 129 Shuttle launches remaining: 5 “Shuttle Experience” rides experienced: 1 Cost of Space Shuttle Atlantis [dollars]: 1.7 billion Total cost of the International Space Station [dollars]: