where physics and life collide
Archive for March, 2010
Collisions imminent
Mar 30th
Howdy lovers,
Well, today’s the day! The LHC people have decided, along with all the experimenters, that it’s time to collide some protons at 7 TeV. Actually, the hoopla was originally scheduled to start this morning at 09h00 (CERN time). That plan was amended several times, so that physicists I talked to all had different ideas of the actual start time for colliding the beams (I heard 03h00 at some point). The initial attempts this morning to ramp the beam have both failed due to unforeseen errors in the quench protection system (QPS) and some other electronics, but they’re now saying they expect beam (and collisions!) to be ready around noon or 13h00. So, that means that our early risers in the US might be privy to all the good shit.
For your viewing pleasure, we’ve compiled a list of links to various webcasts broadcasting the day’s activities:
- LHC First Physics Webcast (be sure to click around to the various webcams, at the bottom of the page)
- Our beloved OP Vistars (Page1 is often the most informative)
- CMS cameras: One Two Three
- ATLAS public page, home to a nice feed and some pretty pictures
- ATLAS event displays
- A pretty informative CERN Twitter feed
- The LHC Announcer (this dude talks to you about the LHC activities)
So, click away. We’ll try to keep you updated, maybe copying some of the pretty photos of the day here for you to see. Let us know if you find other interesting webcasts to link here, either by commenting or by e-mailing dipole@cernlove.org.
Happy collisions!
UPDATE: We have collisions! At 13h22, the LHC people declared “STABLE BEAMS,” and we’ve been seeing 7 TeV collisions ever since. The press release is here, and the champagne is everywhere.
Diner conversations everywhere
Mar 27th
I present to you “the most inane conversation ever captured on camera,” all thanks to CERN. I’ll start the video at 5:36 for some setup, but the really relevant bit is at 7:26, a transcript of which follows,
Fearne: What’d you want to talk about. We can talk about anything.
Peaches: Ummm, the Large Hadron Collider.
Fearne: The what?
Peaches: You know they have made this thing called the Large Hadron Collider. It’s in Texas or something, where they are trying to create a black hole in space.
Fearne: Right, you want to talk about space.
Peaches: Yeah.
Fearne: Go for it.
Peaches: Well, I’ve always been interested in Quantum physics, and about theories of, you know, how we came to be and why… Um, which is I guess how I got involved in spirituality and stuff and that way and the religious path I choose to go down and stuff.
Fearne: Which is what?
Peaches: I don’t want to talk about it.
[later] I am a scientologist, I’ve been a scientologist for a while now.
[Thanks to Reddit]
Large hardon
Mar 24th
About a week ago, the LHC was preparing itself for its inaugural 2010 current ramp to values consistent with 3.5 TeV energy proton beams. While this was simply an opening act for the feature presentation (actual 3.5 TeV + 3.5 TeV collisions) next week, it certainly was an exciting and optimistic event celebrated widely at CERN and around the world. Record energies were reached in the field of particle acceleration, and the timing was perfect considering the growing awareness of the 2010-2011 LHC physics programme.
One media outlet that decided to express its enthusiasm for the huge success of the LHC’s initial foray into the high energy realm was the British online newspaper The Telegraph. Here is the article they published the day after the successful 3.5 TeV commissioning; really, things are pretty tame in this write-up — catchy headline, video of cute physicists, and lots of fervent anticipation for next week’s collision extravaganza. However, when this article first appeared on the website of The Telegraph, their elation with the world record breaking energy ramp-up was much more apparent:
If that didn’t strike you as odd, have a look at that headline one more time.
Actually, this is quite a natural joke to be made, if you think about it. I was surprised to find that, while ‘large hadron collider’ yields around 900k Google hits, ‘large hardon collider’ only finds 63.4k! I can only hope that our fellow internet comrades will up the efforts to capitalize on this goldmine. Sexual innuendos mix quite well with physics jargon. How do you think the term hadron was derived in the first place? I feel like we’re not far from hearing the phrases ‘beam dump’ and ‘that’s what she said’ used together quite regularly.
On the other hand, the top hit of that Google search surely sets the bar pretty high: http://largehardoncollider.com/
Towering rabbit of doom
Mar 22nd
Everyone knows that bunnies are cute and fluffy; why then do human-constructed likenesses of them turn out to be so utterly terrifying? Appearing harmless and adorable in nature, a bunny writ large is at best creepy and at worst, devastating. And yet we insist on creating ever larger monuments to the long-eared ones. It’s possible that our widespread practices of rabbit idolatry perversely reflect some deep and ancient animosity between the races; after all, a child’s first impulse, when given a small (possibly edible) bunny effigy, is to bite off its head. Like other dangerous and potentially world-ending pursuits, CERN finds itself right in the center of the ongoing human vs. bunny struggle, with rabbit flesh prominently featured as a dish on the lab’s rotating menu. Now the world’s tallest chocolate bunny has been erected a stone’s throw away from the LHC in the outskirts of Geneva. Physicists and laypersons alike were encouraged to worship at the feet of this delicious and unholy monstrosity. While other countries may claim to have constructed the most massive, I sincerely doubt anyone can beat this 5-meter tall chocolate bunny.
I fear that our overweening pride has not only threatened the destruction of the universe, but that this graven image shall reach unto the heavens as the ancient tower of Babel, its pointy ears penetrating the event horizon of some intergalactic time warp, bringing down Armageddon upon our heads.
LHC Update – March 2010
Mar 18th
Some of our readers not plugged-in to the everyday scene of physics at the high energy frontier might be confused remembering that we promised you some bad-ass proton collision action somewhere around 14 February, which was over a month ago, and realizing that, indeed, the beloved 7 TeV data is still nowhere to be found. In fact, the media has been so focused on the 1-year shutdown expected for the LHC in 2012 (and seriously, it’s not because of the Mayan calendar…) that no one has really posed the obvious question: “Umm, hey… wasn’t there supposed to be stuff happening already this year?”
Have no fear, friends. Your friendly LHC scientists are simply making sure they are working with a well-oiled machine, and these kinds of delays are completely normal. January and February were used for commissioning the machine at low current, and further developing the Quench Protection System (QPS); here’s a nice article by SymmetryBreaking giving some more information about the LHC’s QPS. Having a robust protection against accidents such as the one in September 2008 is clearly a high priority. Beam was re-introduced to the LHC a few weeks ago, and the progress is steadily imrpvoing, however carefully the technicians are working.
Tonight is a special night, however. For the first time in 2010, we are witnessing the LHC dry-ramping* to the current which corresponds to a 3.5 TeV proton energy; this is the target energy for collisions in the 2010-2011 run. Of course, live coverage is brought to you by OP Vistars. In case you missed it, here’s a snapshot in the early stage of the ramp.
(*Dry-ramping implies the current in the magnets of the LHC are being ramped up, but that there is no proton beam circulating at the time.)
Kick the tires and light the fires.
We here at CERN Love are as giddy as schoolgirls about this.
Behind the scenes: how physics really gets done
Mar 15th
As a non-physicist, you may think that physicists spend their time writing equations on chalkboards, tweaking complicated machines, or scribbling equations on chalkboards. If you read Dan Brown, you probably think they run around in white lab coats. However, hands-on work involving machines and equipment is often given to undergraduate interns and graduate students, while PhD physicists conduct their work a little differently…
- CERN physicists spend most of their work day in meetings, not in labs or their offices.
- There are so many meetings that committees have been formed to hold meetings to figure out how to reduce the number of meetings (I am not making this up).
- Physics analysis is done on laptops during meetings, because it has to get done sometime, and physicists are always in meetings.
- Nobody pays attention to the speaker because they’re submitting physics analysis jobs and creating ugly ROOT graphs on their laptops; they know they can always get the slides later from Indico, the conference management tool everybody uses to post their slides.
- The presenters know nobody is listening so instead of creating readable PowerPoint slides or learning the most basic presentation skills, they write entire blocks of fully formed text in their PowerPoint slides using miniscule font sizes and read verbatim from the slides in an often inaudible monotone. They know that if anyone wants to see their results, they’ll just read the slides on Indico later. Generally the presenter faces the screen, with his/her back to the audience.
This behavior habitual and completely ingrained. I was once in a tutorial for physicists held in a computer lab, where every seat had a desk with a dedicated computer terminal. The participants all filed into the room, sat down at their computer terminals, got out their laptops, put them in front of the computer terminals, and plugged their laptops in at the same time, blowing the room’s electrical circuits.
Finding your way around CERN
Mar 12th
We have already noted that “the building numbers here don’t make a damn bit of sense. If they do follow any kind of scheme, it’s not a scheme that helps you find buildings.” So, suppose you have a workshop to attend in the AB auditorium in building 6. You might know where building 5 is, but one learns very quickly that that sort of information doesn’t do you the tiniest bit of good at CERN. Instead, your only resource is undoubtedly the ancient “WWW Map” of CERN.
(By the way, I once spent twenty minutes wandering the halls of building 6 trying to find the infamous AB auditorium. Not to be outdone, at CERN the room numbers can be just as confusing as the building numbers.)
I actually find CERN’s building map page mostly effective and a cute little throwback to a time before Google Maps. It’s the horseshoe crab of web pages, ugly but effective. Go ahead and open Netscape 1.0 (or maybe something even older) and find yourself a building, if that happens to be your thing. It’s all just GIFs and links (image maps are used in some places, but not nearly as much as you would expect), and most of the time it gets you where you need to go.
Of course though, there are some serious and silly limitations,
- Clicking top map zooms out revealing the only other zoom level available. Clicking bottom maps inexplicably takes you back to the home page. Panning is never an option.
- If you land in the Prevessin site the bottom right map doesn’t indicate this at all. From the home page try CERN Clubs Spaces > Picnic area; if you don’t have an inkling that this is on the Prevessin site then you are going to be very confused for a while.
- The orientations of the other two maps are not consistent with the the overview map in the bottom right (the only one with north properly straight up). Why they did this I don’t have a clue; my only guess is that they wanted to layout the Meyrin site a little more horizontally. This is a big reason why the previous picnic area example is so confusing, the shape of the Prevessin site is not as obvious when presented in multiple orientations.
- At least at first glance, there are no simple everything-in-a-pdf versions of the maps. There is a very prominent link to a 3D PDF that takes a while to download and render, after which you realize the 3D in this case is a useless gimmick. I have run across a PDF with 3D content a total of zero times outside of this page; there must be a very good reason for this. Actually, there are PDF maps of all the sites, but the only place you can find them is via a very subtle link at the bottom of the map page after you have clicked on a point of interest or searched for a building. There is no link at all from the main page. (Contrary to what it says, they are accessible outside of CERN, one slightly pleasant surprise.)
Hoping to discover what other information might be available, I found my way to the GS Department Patrimony and Site Information page. The page is littered with promising links that when poked reveal themselves to be dead and rotting. But, there is one handy find: a GPS navigation page provides a CSV file with the latitude and longitude of all the buildings for uploading to your navigation system. (Relevant to the discussion in our building number post, there is also a page listing the construction date of each of the buildings, but that page is not accessible outside of CERN so I won’t bother linking.)
Finally, a tip: keep watching CERN Love. We are working on a geographical component to the site that hopefully will be handy and informative. We also hope to publish some interactive informational pages that will be very relevant to the start up of the LHC. Both should appear in the next couple weeks.
We’re getting testy
Mar 10th
One disgruntled physicist who sits in Building 40 is fed up. Remind me to never leave my coffee dishes anywhere near this dude(ette).
Public spaces NOT to be used for dish storage.
If we're not testing the parameters of the standard model, we sure as hell are testing each other's patience...
How you found us
Mar 8th
A fascinating aspect of writing this blog has been to sift through our web logs and see how readers find us. It shows us which topics are relevant to today’s internet. It also disturbs us to discover how twisted your minds are.
Firstly and rightfully, the most commonly used search term is…
- op vistars
Apparently we’re not the only ones who are baffled by the cryptic OP Vistars page. Next we present some ROOT-related searches, not all of which are complimentary:
- fuck you root cern
- root ugly plots
- root cern ugly
- cern root evil
- root cern sucks
- root cern design ugly
- you are the roots of all my evils
- root of all evil cern
- root of all my frustrations
- blinding data cern root
The following searches give us insight as to how the general public views CERN:
- cern and time rifts
- cern to open dimensional rift
- cern broke nov 2009
- cern diamonds
- cern dog
- cern monorail
- plumbing at cern
- cern bufet
- cern swirls
- working at cern boring
Whatever CERN may be, it sure as hell isn’t “boring” and I am disgusted that anyone would type this into Google, and that Google would lead them here. Next, the obligatory potty-related searches:
- cern swiss urine
- lavabo love
- urine and hand washing
- liquid drip when toilet
- hand washing proper sign with foot pedal type
I would really like to know what these people were looking for. On second thought, I really don’t want to know. Here are a few more miscellaneous gems:
- motombo love
- shitty geneva studio
- spiderman+physics+analysis
- how i did not find love
- throbbing eyeball
- what is love half life
- porn love.org
I am completely unable to explain or categorize this one:
- you plote
And all you faithful Spanish readers out there, we love you! if we ever translate CERN Love into other languages, Spanish will be the first:
- blog del cern en español
The LHC thrust deep into our cultural consciousness
Mar 5th
Congratulations CERN media relations, someone in Spain is clearly drinking your Kool-Aid (or Flavor Aid, it seems history is unclear).
Remember that smutty detector porn that CERN started feeding the media a few years back? The stuff where our super-conducting toroids are laid bare, nothing left to your nerdy imagination. How can you not forget?
Here, let me introduce you to an old friend, it may have a temporary word with your techno-thalamus,
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Either the guy is really small or the orifice is really big.
This image can be found in the ATLAS barrel magnet gallery as well as in every media packet ever distributed by CERN. If you are a heavy pop-sci consumer you senses are probably already deadened to it. (Do you remember your mom warning you about this stuff back when you were 13? She should have.) Well, if you browsed the magnet gallery just a little bit too long then you might be struck by a jarring final image like this
Familiar? from a production of Berlioz's Les Troyens last year
This is from what seems have been a very short lived production of Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain. It’s the classic legend of Troy and Carthage in the form of opera, but this very contemporary production seems to have been ripped from the science and technology section of your local paper by the same people who brought you Battlefield Earth. According to one review the theater company directing the production “was received with mixed applause and boos.” After watching the following montage of the production–where it seems bits of every sci-fi drama ever produced was collided at near the speed of light, irradiating the performers, and transporting them back to college in which everyone is issued a MacBook–I think I would be applauding and booing at the same time, both loudly. The ATLAS toroid scene is at 1:09,
[By the way, if you want to learn more about this theater company, La Fura dels Baus, and you decide to visit their web site at www.lafura.com, you might take into consideration the fact that you will be treated to immediate full screen video. If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your setting and sensibilities) the random clip will include nudity or even simulated sex. Good times.]
Correction: as the first comment points out, I originally put “Palau de les Arts” where I meant “La Fura dels Baus” in the last paragraph.
Things physicists say
Mar 3rd
For years, an experimental physicist sits through countless hours of physics lectures which mostly focus on the theoretical. Hypothetical is the name of the game. Being engulfed in a sea of abstract jargon, a few phrases really adhere to a physicist’s subconscious, making him prone to conversational non sequiturs. A few qurirks that come to mind are excessive use of the words trivial and coupling. For example, “These cables seem to be trivially wired, yet I can’t tell how these two are coupled.” A little bit of an awkward oratorical toolkit develops over one’s education.
But, I feel that one introductory phrase really exemplifies the problem associated with developing this flavor of vocabulary. Let’s consider the expression, “In principle.” From the Free Dictionary, “in principle” actually seems well defined:
in principle – with regard to fundamentals although not concerning details
Pretty clear, right? “In principle” should probably be used to discuss more lofty or general ideas and situations, as opposed to everyday, common issues. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Don’t say this:
- In principle, the weather is nice today.
- In principle, I am hungry.
- In principle, I’d like you to plot the diphoton pT as well as the jet pT.
- In principle, we should go out sometime.
Say this:
- In principle, we expect two solutions to this equation.
- I agree with you, in principle.
- In principle, the distributions should be identical.
- In principle, I should find you attractive, but I actually don’t.
Okay, so, maybe don’t say that last one. But, social graces are a whole other lesson that we should probably cover someday soon.
No smoking
Mar 1st
At the CERN hostel, this sign indicates that you may not smoke cigarettes, cigars or pipes. I guess it’s ok to smoke anything else.
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