CERN Love
where physics and life collide
LHC Update – March 2010
32 years ago
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
12 years ago
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
12 years ago
by lots-o-love
in On the grounds
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
02 years ago
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
02 years ago
by biglove
in Media hysteria
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
12 years ago
by lots-o-love
in Media hysteria
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
12 years ago
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
1At the CERN hostel, this sign indicates that you may not smoke cigarettes, cigars or pipes. I guess it’s ok to smoke anything else.
Where are my robot hands?
12 years ago
Earlier we discussed the LHC’s current robot monorail, little TIM, but 30 years ago CERN had far loftier goals and they were all about getting grabby. What follows are some photos grudgingly requinquished by CERN’s document server. The first one is my favorite, because this fellow is clearly living the 1981 dream.
Ever wish you could just shoot your arms through an iron-impregnated concrete wall and shake some sense into that radioactive pressure vessel on the other side? In 1981 you could.
The robot arms were eventually upgraded and attached to both monorails and trucks tethered by umbilical cord. “MANTIS’ as it was known, has more photos in CDS. You can also read more at “MANTIS – a compact mobile remote-handling system for accelerator halls and tunnels”, “MANTIS 2 : a new long range remote vehicle and servo-master-slave manipulator for the CERN accelerator complex” and “Teleoperator evolution at CERN”.
Reading some of those documents, MANTIS sounds like a really handy guy. Maybe that is why he was eventually incorporated into the military-industrial complex; given complex reasoning skills; and, through some fortune, jolted into a zest for more than just the life of a radioactive science-slave or autonomous killing machine. CERN was the crucible in which was forged one who “is alive”, a crafty, cultured cowboy. We miss you, Johnny Five!
Left: a slave in the bowels of CERN. Right: bandanas aren't just for the human overlords anymore.
The problem of gender
22 years ago
In the 21st century, it can sometimes be difficult to tell men and women apart. Of course, if you spend enough time with a person, you can discern their gender based on a variety of social cues. However, when it comes to toilets, it seems to me that the role of a sign maker should be to accentuate, celebrate, and make abundantly clear the differences between the male and female body, so that the reader knows exactly what is going on at first glance. The last thing any of us wants is an unwelcome intrusion of the opposite gender while we are doing our business.
The highly stylized man and woman icons shown above are apparently not clear enough for the occupants of building 40. In their typical can-do mindset, these physicists have taken matters into their own hands and added some explanatory signage.
This home-brew solution of adding signs and annotating existing ones, while effective, seems a bit overwrought. Where can we look for better answers? One shining example is to be found just outside the Main Auditorium, where the men’s room door demonstrates in no uncertain terms just which kind of human may enter, while simultaneously discouraging riff-raff from degrading the premises with anything less than a suit, bowtie and dress shoes.
Stick figures can also be identified by a more direct method of course: by drawing the genitalia. While we have not yet found it at CERN, this method is being used nearby in western Switzerland.
I would like to thank lovehurts for providing the last photograph. He took it while urinating … standing up.
Farm life and accelerators
42 years ago
The highest energy accelerators in the world cover a lot of ground. The LHC tunnel passes mostly hidden under pasture and a few small farms, but even right in the middle of the laboratories, assembly buildings, and offices of CERN’s Meyrin site one finds a flock of sheep. The sheep rotate through a few disjoint grassy patches small enough that I really start to wonder if it’s worth the trouble. CERN’s sibling over in the US, Fermilab, hosts on its grounds some even more substantial farm and wildlife: bison, horses, deer (though the population was heavily culled a few years back to make the roads safer) and some ponds well stocked with fish and frequented by herons.
At least one person has relayed the speculation that the animals are primarily present to allay local’s fears of radiation: if sheep can spend all day snacking on top of an accelerator then how dangerous can it be? The problem I have with this theory is that it makes no mention of the scientists who spend just as much time in just as much proximity to our scary science stuff. Does the public honestly think we are so driven to distraction by our whizzing particles that we might very well hang our balls in the beam to see if it tickles? Let me go on record and say definitively, no, we are not.
Below I present evidence of how deadly serious the Fermilab-CERN competition is.
Sheep take shelter under CERN's ISR overpass near one of the LHC assembly building.
One of my many coyote sightings at Fermilab
Potential for future study:
- Apply a Lotka–Volterra model to the CERN and Fermilab scientific populations.
- Cite this blog post as the only motivation.
- Win Ig Nobel prize (for a physicist of my meager stature, the equivalent of ‘profit’).
That is unless one of our five highly esteemed readers scoops me on this. I dare you.
CERN Document Server
CERN Document Server
2
2 years ago
by biglove
in You're doing it wrong
CERNLover lots-o-love expertly commented on one of CDS’s completely terrible web pages. Today I am reviewing a true classic: http://cds.cern.ch, none other than the CDS home page itself. I should admit that I feel a bit sheepish today; finding egregious flaws on CDS web pages is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is just so universally bad that I’m not sure where to start. Might as well start at the top.
click to see annotations
CDS stands for CERN Document Server. It’s a long and difficult acronym (no, not really), so the CDS folks have helped you out by putting that title right at the top where you can’t miss it. Twice.
Sandwiched between them is the tiny word “Home”. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a link; it’s not (I know you already clicked on it). Oh no, if it were a link, it would be a very slightly darker shade of blue indistinguishable to the human eye. Nope, “Home” is just a tiny word surrounded by ample whitespace, serving no purpose whatsoever. It’s true that that on other CDS pages, that space is occupied by breadcrumbs telling you your location, but on the main page it just looks dumb.
Let’s move on to the proud proclamation of how many records CDS has. Actually there are two such statements, about a centimeter apart on my screen … and they don’t match. Just when you thought 900,000 was an impossibly large number, well GUESS WHAT, 1,017,486 is even bigger! I guess we can never really know just how many records CDS has, but rest assured, it’s a gigantic number! A large portion of these records are “fulltext“, a term I (a native English speaker) and my English-speaking friends have never heard in our lives. I’m certainly ready to believe that it is some computer science or librarian term, but I question whether any users actually know or care what it means. Apparently it’s pretty damned impressive though for archives to be sporting fulltext, because it deserves its own sentence. As soon as I find out what the fuck fulltext is I’m going to convert all the documents on my computer to it.
Search or browse? You decide! It’s not clear from first glance what the difference is. I know what “browse” usually means on a website (basically looking through categories instead of text search), but not here. Go ahead, type in a word, click “Browse” and see if you can figure out what the fuck is going on.
Not entering any search or browse terms today? Then perhaps CDS can interest you in two incredibly dense columns filled with terms nobody understands, but by God, every single one of them is a hyperlink pointing somewhere. These columns are labeled “Narrow by collection” and “Focus on“. Every time I read these two labels, my brain grinds to an infuriated halt. Don’t those mean the same thing?! Is there a discernable reason that there are 5 checkboxes next to the left column but not the right? Oh God I am so confused. Those checkboxes and underlining under every single word are making me all misty-eyed remembering my first day learning HTML. Seriously though, the point here is to be impressed by the sheer number of subjects CDS has in its archive. You’re not supposed to be actually reading those, you idiot!
If you do attempt to read the headache-inducing arrangement of subjects, you’ll find some oddities that will make you completely lose whatever faith you may have had in CDS up to this point. For example, there are both “videos” and “videotapes”. I have to admit I don’t understand the difference here. And if you click on “General Talks”, you get a list of … videos.
A truly baffling item at the end of the second column is the heading “Archives”. Holy hell! Do you mean that up until now I haven’t been looking at archives? I thought CDS was by definition an archive! And by the way, CERN Archives apparently make up a subset of Archives, even though I thought the C in CDS stood for CERN. Actually I’m certain it does.
Finally, at the bottom of the page, far, far away from the search box, are some more search options. If you are lucky enough to know what the hell these things are (KISS, anyone?), you might want to include them in your search (after you’ve already done searches that didn’t work, I suppose). That’s kind of like Google saying way at the bottom of their page “Didn’t find what you were looking for? Would you like to search the WHOLE internet? Because up until now we’ve just been fucking with you. Step right up and click a bunch of checkboxes, and we’ll be on our way!”
Amazingly, I only have one suggestion that will fix everything at once with one stroke. Just change the word “site” at the bottom to “shite”.
I would like to apologize to the CDS developers for ridiculing their life’s work …. but, damn. You would think they would care a little bit more about their public image.
Happy Valentine’s Day from CERN Love
12 years ago
by biglove
in E-mail adventures
There are a lot of things to celebrate today, including Chinese New Year, the winter Olympics, and the America’s Cup, but Valentine’s Day holds a special place in our hearts, because it is so closely associated with CERN Love core values, including love, hearts, ridicule, loneliness and depression. We would like to take this moment to thank you, our readers, with a special poem.
Roses are red,
Dipoles are blue,
All you lonely physics groupies, remember,
CERN Love loves you!
We’d like to share an email that was sent to the ATLAS Collaboration and intercepted by our electonic intelligence division. You might expect the ATLAS lost and found to be full of pocket protectors, graphing calculators and dosimeters, but it’s not. We’re not sure what this says about ATLAS physicists.
Email from the ATLAS Secretariat regarding the Lost and Found
Peaceful sounds at work
02 years ago
Today, this was the definition of the “ambience” in CERN’s Building 40. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was being sabotaged.
Hear the atmosphere which is so conducive to productive work at CERN.
Open-air Batiment 40
The Tevatron is dead to us
12 years ago
by lots-o-love
in E-mail adventures
Some hacker symbol
Oh, security@cern.ch, I know you mean well, but come on…
I’m not at CERN right now. Of all the places in the world where might I be? The safest guess would be “back a my university or lab,” but let’s not be so generic. If you had to guess one specific place I bet your safest guess would be Fermilab, home to the second highest energy accelerator in the world (but only by a hair, for now). At least in this case you’d be correct. As the LHC continues to slowly work toward interesting collisions, a scientist has got to get his science fix from somewhere. There are hundreds of scientists associated with CERN who continue to work at Fermilab, which makes the security warning email I received recently about the most absurd imaginable (emphasis mine).
From: service-security@cern.ch
Subject: [xxx] XXX: Logins from unusual location(s)CERN computer security checks have detected login(s) using your account
at an unusual location. This might indicate that your account has been
broken into.Please CHECK whether you have established any connection to CERN
between 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx and 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx (Geneva local time)
from the following domain(s):dhcp.fnal.gov (131.225.xxx.xxx, United States, Fermilab)
- If NOT, please urgently contact Computer.Security@cern.ch. Your
account XXX has most probably been broken into.- If YES, then please ignore this e-mail. You will not get another
e-mail notification for your sessions from the domains listed
above.Thanks for your collaboration.
____________________________________________
CERN Security Team | http://cern.ch/security
OK, I’ll admit I don’t connect to one of their login computer every day, maybe not even every week when I’m not at CERN (you pull data off the grid and work locally most of the time), but I certainly do now and then. It never occurred to me I might be operating from a den of l33t haxors.
Spares
02 years ago
The LHC will employ the use of 1,232 dipole magnets, which are cooled to superconducting temperatures by liquid helium at 2 Kelvin and will provide magnetic fields as strong as 8.33 Tesla. As one might imagine, these puppies are valuable. To string two of them together, without interrupting the circuits through which currents as high as 11,850 Amps will flow, requires a highly sophisticated splice mechanism which must have a resistance of less than 0.000080 Ω for the machine to work properly.
Otherwise, this happens.
Of course, since CERN decided to display these magnificent beasts prominently (including one proudly and boldly showcased on the otherwise beautiful green lawn outside CERN’s Restaurant 1), they had to find a way to protect their valuable end-connections. These are the blag end-plugs you see in this photo of the lawn dipole.
Well, I suppose CERN had a spare endcap. I would never have been creative enough to devise this plan for its fate.
Another magnet cover-gone-planter.
It really ties the room together.
Dripping liquid on head after urinating: Toilet Design Awards 2010
02 years ago
Recently I “drained the dragon” in one of CERN’s plumbing-oriented establishments, choosing a urinal as my preferred receptacle of the day. As I looked down, flushed, and set about the generally onerous task of negotiating my considerably out-sized family jewels back into their boxers, I felt liquid dripping onto the back of my head. Leaping back, I looked up in shock and terror to see that
- each urinal has its own tank (I’m told this is called a cistern),
- each cistern is mounted on the wall directly above the urinal,
- there is apparently no cover for the cisterns, allowing what I hope to God is clean water to slosh out.
I always thought that, even if they are clean (and I’m not convinced of that), toilet-related liquids should be kept inside pipes, and under lids, as close to the ground, and as far away from my head as possible. Just another preconceived notion smashed by CERN plumbing innovation.
Apocalypse CERN
02 years ago
by lots-o-love
in Media hysteria
This is what happens when you mess with the Large Hadron Collider
In my last post there was much talk of monorails, puppies, and Flashforward, which is a book that came out in 1999. So why am I suddenly down with 1999? It’s all thanks to ABC Studios’ desperate need to spackle some twisted-timeline programming into the gaping hole that will be left when their mega-hit Lost completes its final season this year. Their solution is a FlashForward for TV, loosely based on the novel. The premise that both the book and TV show share is that for some reason every human on Earth passes out for two minutes and during that time sees their life at a specific date in the future. In the book it is 21 years in the future, in the TV show it is 6 months in the future (set in the present time, the show chooses the date they plan for the season finale).
Actually other than the basic premise just described there seem to be few similarities. The book takes place around CERN, and the LHC turn-on is the likely culprit. The TV show, on the other hand, is set in Los Angles with some FBI agents that don’t have a clue about the cause of the flashforward and presumably at least the entire season will be devoted to piecing together the clues.
Technically all this information may constitute a spoiler, at least according to this Bad Astronomy post. I assume what they are referring to is the fact that the LHC may turn out to be the culprit in the TV version. Of course I didn’t go to any trouble to warn you about spoilers because that is just absurd. The connection to CERN in the book is pretty damn easy to run across (try the third line of Google’s “flashforward“), and there is no reason they couldn’t come up with a different explanation, the surprise of which wasn’t recorded in great detail 10 years ago. So, I’m betting the LHC won’t be up for an Emmy next year, but it wouldn’t hurt for those of you around CERN to keep your eyes open for film crews.
Time magazine has a video interview with Robert Sawyer about his book, the TV show, and CERN (it’s embeded in that “spoiling” Discovery Mag post and also below). After speaking about the book and CERN, the issue of what might be revealed in the TV show is brought up, and of course Sawyer declines to comment.
Also, if you crave even more, CERN has some video interviews with Robert Sawyer and John Ellis about Flashforward.
FlashForward is on a mid-season break right now, but it will be back in March and for now you can watch the 10 already broadcast episodes on Hulu. (Sadly, Hulu doesn’t work outside the US. Those at CERN or generally engaged in unAmerican living: Tekzilla explains how to use an open proxy. In the Tekzilla video they use proxy-list.org which has given me useful proxies, though it can take a few tries and, as they say on Tekzilla, for security reason you definitely shouldn’t use these for anything but watching videos.)
Also, for even more physics going awry you should definitely check out the short film “Rift” (found via Discovery News). Its hard to imagine this wasn’t inspired by the LHC considering it was made last year, if you watch the spinning atom-ish orbs during the presentation you will note that RHIC gets the blame. Also note that “Rift” has the best opening line in cinema, “Morning Mr. Scientist, I made blueberry pancakes!” Have I ever gotten that from my wife? I think not. Mostly it is just “Hey Mr. Lazy, I don’t care if you were up all night tending your batch jobs, get up and make me some cream of wheat!”
If you continue “reading” you can enjoy both the first episode of FlashForward and Rift embedded below.
Monorails
42 years ago
This is TIM
The LHC must have received a visit from a fast talking Mr. Lanley because I just learned that they have a monorail, and it’s name is TIM! How did this slip by me until now?
TIM stands for Train Inspection Monorail, which is a hugely awkward redundancy and goes to show that no grammar will stand between a scientists and his acronym. (Unless I turn out to be hugely misinformed: does the LHC tunnel contain another train, one of such vital importance that they built a monorail to inspect it?) Someone is clearly very wedded to “TIM”. But, if this boxy ceiling crawler absolutely must play the role of nondescript schoolyard chum in the “unique” three-act play that our robot descendants will write about every last one of us, is there a reason we’re not working from Tunnel Inspection Monorail?
TIM is expected to be useful for preliminary environmental inspections before workers or emergency crews enter. It may also be used for inspecting the collimators, which become one of the most radioactive elements of the machine after running. (The collimators sweep away stray protons around the beam and so end up taking a substantial particle bombardment.) In addition, I might propose that TIM, at 30×30 cm, is also the perfect size for moving puppies.
These are puppies, in a monorail.
There is an easy-reading technical note on CDS if you crave more monorail info. No puppies are mentioned.
If you will allow a touch of free association, it’s as good a time as any to mention Flashforward, a novel by Robert Sawyer, that I have been hearing about recently though it was published back in 1999. It is set in and around CERN and centers around a cataclysmic event precipitated by the LHC. (A new TV show loosely based on the novel has been running in the US, I’ll have more to say about it in a future post.) From the science media commentary and the few excerpts I have read, it seems to take a more realistic view of CERN than Dan’s Brown stain, Angels and Demons.
But, one liberty Flashforward does take is to describe scientists traveling around the LHC via monorail. “Utter poppycock!” I would exclaim… until today. If by “scientists” Sawyer was speaking of puppies, then I think he’s on to something.
(Oh, and the book also mentions flying cars. It just might be a good read, but fuck flying cars.)
Addendum: I ran across another article on TIM, “Remotely-operated equipment for inspection, measurement and handling.”
Rusty pipes
32 years ago
Every unused parking lot and road side is a potential scrapyard, and CERN is blessed with a lot of strange junk. Here’s a random example. Any ideas what this was?
Feedback