EPS2011: Summer of particle physics

This blog is called "Life and Physics", and for the last few weeks it feels like these have been pretty much the same thing. Conference season is on us again, the Large Hadron Collider has delivered a shedload of data, and we need to understand it and show the results. I'm writing this on the plane home from CERN . I would have loved to post more about ATLAS preparations for the European Physical Society meeting in Grenoble, but I haven't had time and anyway half of it was secret until now. (The Higgs results are still not quite public, watch this space.) If you remember when the Higgs rumours from ATLAS were flying around, I (and others) said they should be ignored because the results had not been reviewed even by the rest of the collaboration, and certainly not by independent referees. These last days and weeks have been an organised chaos of getting many different results (Higgs-related and otherwise) ready and passing them through the various many stages of collaboration review . I'll write about some of them soon, though if I covered them all I think you'd all give up from a surfeit particle physics. And that's just ATLAS. I am just about now beginning to look forward to what other experiments at and beyond the LHC might reveal about fundamental physics over the next few days. Looks like being even better than last summer . Part of me wishes I was there hearing Physics. But most of me is very glad to be home right now, having some Life.