Swinging cats and levitating frogs

Posted on 05/10/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Congratulations to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov on winning the Nobel prize in physics – not for their frog-levitating work, but for groundbreaking studies of graphene

On The Guardian.

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Keep calm, carry on, but don’t keep quiet

Posted on 04/10/2010 by Jon Butterworth

See also Chapter 4.1 of Smashing Physics.

I have been dealing with cuts in science since 2007. It can be draining and depressing, but I have learned at least two important lessons.

The HERA collider started up for the first time just as I was finishing my doctoral research. I was on “safety shift” on the ZEUS detector on one of the very early nights of data-taking. ZEUS was a massive particle detector, about 20 metres high and hidden behind concrete shielding. Safety shift was a good one for inexperienced grad students. Just plod around every hour reading dials and ticking a list, and report anything strange to the shift leader.

Continued on The Guardian.

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Health and Safety in Particle Physics II

Posted on 29/09/2010 by Jon Butterworth

After Lily’s post on poor risk assessment in particle physics, I thought I should bring to your attention the risk of putting your hand in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – as discussed by Ed Copeland and his colleagues at Nottingham University.

Continued at The Guardian.

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Black holes and falling objects

Posted on 29/09/2010 by lilyasquith

I was driving into Argonne with a colleague yesterday morning and he was telling me about the experiment (E687) that he worked on when he was a graduate student. It caught fire and burnt down. The reason for the fire was found to originate from a very high voltage power supply with no fuse. This alone would not have caused the fire. The wires in those days were flammable, and they were hanging down a bit where they were fed into the detector so they were separated with (highly flammable) polystyrene wedges.

Continue at The Guardian.

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