#PhysicistsAtHome

Posted on 21/03/2020 by

Katarina Anthony and the education and outreach team of the ATLAS experiment have started soliciting short videos from across our collaboration (and hence across the world) as we all hunker down and try to work from home during the Coronavirus pandemic. I was honoured to feature in the first one along with Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez  (of “Lonely Chairs at CERN” fame) and (very briefly) Elias Coniavitis. Here it is.

Watch our for more soon under the #PhysicistsAtHome hashtag, should you want to see what physicists and their homes look like.

I guess all the chairs at CERN are lonely now 😦

But we’ll be back.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics Stories, Rambling | Tagged , , , , , ,

Modelling the invisible part of the cross-section

Posted on 20/03/2020 by

Written simultaneously with, and spookily relevant to, my previous post. And yes, he really does know a lot of people who design parton showers.

2 eV Blog

I am on day 3 – or is it 4, I lose count – of a quarantine since coming down with mild flu-like symptoms on Tuesday.  For about half of that time I have been asleep, but the other half has seen a parade of infuriating posts on social media, many of which come from people who should know better.  The theme of the moment seems to be that anyone who has installed matplotlib and knows how to call numpy.exp() is getting the crayons out and making predictions by extrapolating trends from very little information.  It is dismaying indeed to see people who design parton showers for a living point at a scaling law and cry “we’re doomed” without asking what its region of validity is.  And if you think this comment is aimed specifically at you, you are wrong because everyone is doing this right now and I…

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Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , ,

Reinterpretation of Data

Posted on 19/03/2020 by

Good data can be interpreted many ways. (So can bad data of course, but that’s boring.)

This is not a comment on any recent epidemiology modelling, though I suppose there may be some issues in common. Here in my little loft-space, with my various teleconference options now augmented by “Teams”, I am still carrying on with particle physics, while my daughter has online lessons downstairs and my son frets about cancelled A levels. And my wife is still at school teaching.

But yes, particle physics, if you fancy a break.

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Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , , , , ,

The science stories that shaped 2019

Posted on 23/12/2019 by

In the Observer, with a contribution from me.

Posted in Astrophysics, Physics, Science | Tagged , ,