The . . . Enchanted Forest?

The laboratory I work in is located in a rather remote area compared to the rest of the university and the center of the city.  Considering the offices and departments located here, I suspect that the campus was organized to house anything to do with the words "nuclear," "radiation," or "particle" in the last forty years.  It is a quiet campus, and a decent walk from the nearest bus stop.

With all the rain that Belgium gets as part of its normal fall weather, I was not surprised to see lots of mushrooms and moss popping up outside the laboratory.  I was surprised to see this one, though:

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physis: The Theory

October this year brought rain and a Nobel prize to Belgium, as Francois Englert of the Free University of Brussels won the 2013 physics prize along with Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh.  They were recognized for  “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”[1].  I think my field is witnessing the end of an era.

The first subatomic particle discovered as such was the electron in 1895, and in the following decades many, many more particles were discovered, including protons, neutrons, muons, pions, and neutrinos.  Different ways by which particles interact were also identified.  As the list of particles got larger, patterns in their properties and behavior began to emerge.  Theorists began to look for theories that explained these patterns.  Quark theory was the answer to describing all the hadrons, while the description of how particles interacted was built by Sheldon Glashow in 1960.

Things I don't understand

The two on the left are approximately the size of a nickel with a normal spread of their legs.  The one on top right is about the size of a quarter.  The one on the bottom left is about three inches/eight cm across.

1. Why Belgium is currently hosting so many public spiders.  I cross the ones shown here (plus a few more of the orange and black ones) every day on my way to the bus stop; they live in an archway connecting my apartment complex's central grounds to the street.  I passed a bridge this morning with a web, half of them occupied, strung in each gap between railing pillars.  I do not want to think about what this implies for the current state of the fly population, or what it could be like.

2. Why Ikea requires those buying a couch, a piece of furniture that is not flat-packed, to load the item on a trolley and drag it the full length of the warehouse to and through the check-out lines.  We then had to pull the thing to customer service and wait in line until one of the employees brought out the cushion covers for us.

The couch moved by customers and the cushion covers handled only by employees.

3. Why everyone in my building seems to have cheese with their lunch.  I understand that I am in Europe and cheese is a big deal around and inside the French border, but so are sausages and I don't see the refrigerator packed with them.  Even if gouda isn't the strongest cheese around, when the refrigerator houses more than a dozen specimens non-stop it can start to get a bit . . . whiffy.

4. Why if I print the values of variable x and get the list {172.15,172.25,172.35,172.45,172.55,172.65,172.75,172.85}, the test x == 172.15 never, ever returns true.  The test x == 172.25 returns true, but never x == 172.15.  The list is populated with ever possible value of x, and yet the test fails.  I lost the better part of a day and some of my trust in the logic of computers to that one.

That is a lot of incomprehension accumulated by a Tuesday.

Brussels and Ghent

August is the month of vacations in Western Europe, when all the local vanish and the train stations are packed with people carrying suitcases and speaking every language but the native one.  While I don't teach and do not get a summer vacation of that sort, my university closed for a couple weeks in July and I took the chance to see some sights with my family.  Some I'd seen and shared before, but I did get to a few Belgian ones that were new to me.

Brussels: The Manneken Pis

There are many varied stories about the origins of this statue.  Some hold that it was the gift of a father to the city when the townsfolk helped him find his lost son.  Others say it commemorates a boy who helped stopped enemies by peeing on their bombs.  The Manneken Pis (or little pee man) is one of Brussels' most famous sights.  The statue even has costumes for different seasons of the year and is decorated for city events.

That being said, it is a tiny statue, maybe two feet tall, on a fountain in the middle of an otherwise nondescript neighborhood in central Brussels.  The area looks like this:

 

The Manneken Pis is hidden just barely by the chocolate shop on the right in the photo above.  There are three chocolate shops visible in that photo, two of them being Godiva and Leonidas.  Neuhaus has a location just up the street, as do a few others.  There are also several waffle and ice cream places.  I found it an interesting cross-section of tourist interests in Belgium.

Brussels: Atomium

The Atomium was built to be the centerpiece of the World's Fair(?) in 19**.  The name is a mash-up of "atom" and "aluminum," as the main theme of the fair was progressing into the future through new technology.  At the time, it contained the fastest elevator and long escalators in the world.

 

The Atomium is a striking tower in Brussels' skyline, and it contains exhibits on the fair it was built for and a few temporary modern art installations.  That's all.  I wasn't overwhelmed with it.  The story of the exhibits didn't flow well, and the audio guide was difficult to understand.  In fact, some of the audio guide monologues were matched to the wrong parts of the exhibit.  The best part of the visit was taking visits of its exterior, and seeing Brussels from the highest dome, as shown below.

Ghent: Clock Tower

Ghent is a university town and one of Flanders biggest cities.  Its skyline noted for the three main towers, two churches and a bell tower all lined up in the central square.  I was able to visit the bell tower, and it was a lovely short trip.  The main attraction is climbing the tower itself, starting at the base with a room that originally stored important civil documents and now stores the remaining original of four guardians statues on the bell tower (accompanied by three reconstructions of the others).  As you climb, the higher floors hold displays about how the tower was remodeled over the years and the dragon statuette that used to crown it.  The dragons were built to breath fire on major holidays.  My favorite part was the bells, as the tower both has some of the original bells founded centuries ago and information on how the bells are founded.  You can also see the machinery that plays the carillon each hour and walk around a very narrow walkway at the top to get a view of the city.

Taking the stairs, though, is for people with strong calves and no fear of enclosed spaces.  The hallways are extremely narrow.  Most of the floors are also accessible by elevator.  My favorite part, though, was that I was lucky enough to be at the top when the bells rang the hour.  I felt surrounded by the sound, and it was amazing.

It does not say good things . . .

It does not say good things about the agency managing your apartment when they call you on Monday to inform you that your landlords are divorcing and selling the apartment you live in, and then call you on Tuesday to say that actually, that is happening to your neighbors and they got the apartment numbers mixed up.

I dearly hope this gets clarified to mean that we don't have to move.  I moved six times in the year 2012, and I would like to stop evaluating my belongings to make sure they all fit in two suitcases weighing less than 50 lbs each.

Chocolate Cake Tour

 

I think chocolate cake is one of the most perfect desserts.  This means I have collected several chocolate cake recipes, each suited for a different use.  At the easiest end of the spectrum there is the wacky chocolate cake recipe.  No butter, no eggs (making it an option for those who don’t eat those things), very easy to mix up with small people as assistants, and it turns out with the texture of a boxed cake mix but much better flavor.

Mon Bijoux

Once upon a time, I thought that using electrically powered appliances for baking was for wimps.  If our ancestors for ages untold had managed to churn out meal after meal with wooden spoons, whisks, and will power, I could do so as well.  I was a teenager, my mom did most of the cooking and my sister did most of the baking, and my favorite thing to make was a batch of brownies with melted butter.  A wooden spoon or spatula worked just fine, and I didn't have to worry about dangling the cord into anything sticky.  Furthermore, a lot of doughs, either for bread or cookies, were stiff enough that most hand-held mixers (the only kind of mixer I knew of ) couldn't handle them anyway.

Jokes about Units

One of the “joys” of moving from the US to just about any other country is the need to get used to SI, or metric, units.  Food is sold by grams, kilograms, and liters; street signs are marked in kilometers and kilometers per hour.  An attendant joy is that periodically, someone will mock the fact that the US still uses the old English units to your face.  As an American physicist, I have lived and worked with both, and also as a physicist, I can be annoyingly focused on the use of units past the attention span of those cracking the original joke.  So let’s discuss the metric system, shall we?

The metric system was introduced in 1799 in France an attempt to move beyond older and regional systems of units to something more logical and universal.  Today, the metric system has been replaced by le Système international d'unités, often abbreviated SI units.  The idea was to have units that related to each other in a logical way, that could be derived from a set of basic units, and (a bit more modern priority) that could be derived from natural phenomena.  The original basic metric units were the meter (m), the second (s), and the kilogram (kg); the SI system currently has seven fundamental units, adding the Kelvin, the candela, the mole, and the ampere to the original three.  All other units within the system can be derived from simple combinations of this basic group.  For example, the unit for force, the Newton, is defined as the force needed to accelerate 1 kg of material to a speed of 1 m/s in 1 s. 

So . . . where are you?

Through my time at graduate school, I was asked frequently what I wanted to do with my PhD in experimental high energy particle physics.  Personally, I opted to continue doing what I had been doing to take advantage of the amazing stuff happening at CERN now and in the upcoming few years.  So I went hunting for a post-doc position, and I was fortunate enough to find one that offered me a lot of opportunities.

"Lot of opportunities" in this case means I changed just about . . . everything.  I changed research focus, I changed institution, and I changed experiment (adviser's response: "What a good opportunity!" fellow students' response: "Traitor.").  Now I work in the collaboration across the ring, doing precision measurements instead of searches.

This also required a move.  Now I live in . . .

What it takes to finish the PhD, part 1

1.  Perform studies for three years.  Work on projects in five different areas.  Get lectured about not responding to emails fast enough.  Learn many clever tricks to locate code snippets to patch into your own work.

2.  Create a thesis outline.  Watch your adviser rewrite it.  Rewrite it again as you begin working on your thesis (it's just a guideline, really).

3.  Read several other dissertations trying to get a sense of how one puts together such a document.  Puzzle over what in the world makes your adviser say the one packed with grammar mistakes is well-written.  Come to the realization that dissertations are unofficially ranked first on thoroughness and second on originality; writing style is far less a consideration.

Writing a Dissertation: a Word of Caution

I can virtuously say that writing my dissertation started several months before I intended to finish, as I located a suitable template and began copying and pasting chunks of other papers I had written back in November of last year.  I then didn't touch it again for a couple of months.  Hey, I had started it, and I had an outline and everything.

Writing recommenced in February, when the bustle to put out conference notes in early March had larger passed away from this lowly graduate student performing studies and become a thing of editorial boards and professors.  I ended up having a couple of weeks at CERN during which I could focus on writing, but this lovely time ended at the beginning of March when I had to pack up and move back to the United States, to complete my dissertation and prepare for my defense in a place where people couldn't come lean over my desk in my not-cubicle and ask more questions.  At the time, I had drafted about five and a half chapters of my thesis*, two of which my professor had seen.  I anticipated writing at eight total.

I despise moving.  I have nightmares about airports and air travel.  This move was putting some significant distance between me and my fiance.  It was a stressful time.  But I survived the apartment-emptying and stuff-packing and luggage-weighing and goodbye-saying to find myself arriving at the Geneva airport very early in the morning after a painless taxi ride and handing over my luggage with no complaints at all about weight.  It was marvelous.  I settled into my seat for the nine hour flight, and allowed myself to watch a movie before thinking that I should really be good and convert some more of notes into actual dissertation text.  I opened my laptop bag (which also contained my headset, webcam, camera, and several books and other electronics; I was moving after all) and saw this:

What's in a year

 

(You come to the blog and enter upon a scene of colossal clean-up.  The air is cloudy from dust.  In the midst of this, you see our host, hard at work.)

Oh, hello.  Welcome back.  It has been a while, hasn't it?  But I have two very good excuses for that.

Excuse 1:

 

 

Excuse 2:

 

Yup, I finished my PhD (wrote-defended-revised-submitted the thesis) and got married all in one year.  I also moved four times and counting, since I am not done settling in yet.  It's been a busy year. 

Time-out for cake

Sheeeeeeeeee . . . don't tell; I'm supposed to be writing my thesis.

But thesis-writing has the amazing ability to make one both quite hungry and suddenly full of inspiration for every other writing project one has ever contemplated. Ever. So allow me a little cake-writing before returning to my technical design reports.

I am not the baker of my family. Shocking, I know. But growing up I was never as eager to be attached to the oven as my little sister; the attachment to baking came later, when I had to start consistently feeding myself. 'Twas her who collected cookie recipes and could time every element of a meal to be done within minutes. I could . . . well, I could turn out a decent batch of brownies, but more ambitious projects tended to run into problems.

And today at CERN . . .

. . . absolutely no work got done. Instead, everyone flooded the main auditorium early in the morning. It was full by 11:30 a.m. There were people sitting in the aisles. No one could connect to the internet because the wireless routers were flooded. Security prevented anyone else from entering after noon if they hadn't already found a seat.

The reason for the fuss was at 2:00 p.m., when the spokespeople for ATLAS and CMS (in that order) presented the status of their Higgs boson searches with the jaw-dropping amount of data they each collected this year. Details can be found here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

Details can probably also be found on innumerable news and science websites. But I would suggest starting with what CERN had to say on the matter. After all, since scientists at CERN are studying the particle, shouldn't they know best what they've found out?

Change is in the Air

picture from science.nature.nps.gov

Today, the LHC ended the last of its heavy ions runs. Data-taking for 2011 is over, with over 5 inverse femtobarns of data delivered to each of the multipurpose experiments. The technical shut-down has begun.

CERN won't shut down of course, not for a while yet. Analyzing all that data is going at a fever-pitch, and with the end of beams in the accelerator tunnel the accelerator and experiments will be swarmed by engineers and technicians making repairs. But things are changing.

My little corner of this great enterprise is changing, too. As I'm planning on graduating next summer, my time at CERN now has an end date. I will return to the US early next year.

Boy oh boy, do I have a lot to get done.

Chateau de Chillon

No, Romania did not satisfy my craving for castles.

Chateau de Chillon, near Montreux and on the far side of Lac Leman from Geneva, was touted to me as Switzerland's best castle. It's built on a little island just off the lake shore, and it is a honestly, truly, wouldn't be out of place in a fairy tale medieval style castle.

It still took me almost twenty months of living in Switzerland to go visit. My bad. But a couple weeks ago I had a friend visiting and the desire to be a silly tourist, and so hopping on the train and chatting two-thirds of the way around the lake sounded like a lovely way to spend the day. It helped that it was a totally gorgeous fall day. Switzerland is a beautiful country.

Seg-Fault

Sunday evening I baked a batch of cookies. They were pretty good; I ate a few. I brought the remaining two dozen to CERN with me Monday morning, and perched the box on the edge of desk. I work in what is essential a cubicle sans walls, so this box of cookies should have been visible to everyone walking past in the hallway. I even put a handy sign by the cookies to indicate that people could take one.

Yet, Tuesday evening I took the above picture.

Does this surprise anyone else? Untouched cookies? In a very large building populated by physicists? Physicists known for demolishing free food at every opportunity? Seriously, some conferences post guards around the buffet table to make sure we don't "sample" it out of existence before the meal is supposed to start.

Freaky Pharmacy

pictures from www.frenchgardening.com

So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn't exactly get to celebrate it as I had intended. France and Switzerland are aware of Halloween; the stores carry some cheap costumes and make-up and fake spider webs, and I even saw pumpkin carving kits in one. But they don't really seem to get it. Christmas cookies are already on sale. Certainly they don't understand pumpkins. They call all squash pumpkins, which I am staunchly opposed to. Butternut squash are wonderful in their own right, but I'd rather stick with lovely sugar pumpkins for making cookies and pies, thank you very much.

But I didn't get to celebrate Halloween and try to educate those around me into the wonders of pumpkin baked goods, because I wasn't feeling well. Instead, my Halloween was devoted to a terror of an entirely different kind: dealing with French pharmacies.

ESHEP and Romania

Particle physics is a very, very international field. If you don't consider travel a perk, you will have struggles with this field. CERN's experiments involve physicists from hundreds of countries. So, when it comes time to have a conference or school or something, it isn't too difficult to find a colleague from a very interesting place to host said conference or school. Our conferences can turn up in some cool places to visit.

Oh, and in Paris, because judging from the posters around CERN, Paris hosts a disproportionate number of conferences. But who's complaining about that? To share my current favorite quote about the city of lights, "Paris is always a good idea" (Audrey Hepburn).

CERN also hosts schools for students throughout the year, some based at CERN and some that migrate around a bit. I had the awesome opportunity to be part of the European School of High Energy Physics this year, held in Romania. So I with many other CERN physicists flew out to Romania in September for two weeks of physics lectures, mountains, castles, potatoes, and limited internet access. It was awesome. We were at a resort in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania. I could see why vampire legends would flourish here The country was wrinkled with little valleys and crevices that you could miss walking over some plateau you thought was the lowest land. It would be easy to miss something there.

Berlin

After France, Germany was second on my list of European countries I wanted to visit. I had intended to check that off last fall, but for various reasons my travel plans had to change. The first time I made it Germany was shortly before New Year's, when a certain large storm rearranged all travel plans in the northeastern United States and after more than eight hours of nail-biting in the airport and another eight hours of sleep deprivation on the plane, I made it back to Europe by way of the Frankfurt airport instead of going straight to Geneva.

I was in no mood to appreciate any part of Germany that day, and declared that the Frankfurt airport could not be representative of the country. My introduction to Germany must be better than that.

That better introduction was completed by way of Berlin this past August. This is why I needed to get my hair cut.