The Grid

Posted on 17/09/2010 by lilyasquith

I have recently been ‘submitting to The Grid’. This is not some kind of freaky S&M thing, disappointingly perhaps to some. It is a process we have to go through in order to analyze the data being collected by the ATLAS detector at CERN.

The ATLAS experiment has approximately a zillion (2000) people working on it. (My new town declares itself to have 11,000 people but I have not noticed any update to this since we moved here.)

It is burbling out data in vast quantities. We cant catch it all because we would then have to store it somewhere, and it is currently producing terabytes of data per second*. Mental. So we just catch and store some of it. About 100 Megabytes per second.

Continued at The Guardian.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged | Comments Off on The Grid

From liquid argon to M theory?

Posted on 16/09/2010 by Jon Butterworth

See also Chapter 2.6 of Smashing Physics.

Claiming to understand the universe from first principles is all very well, but the foundations have to be built on experiment and observation. And it is slow, hard work. Even in Pisa.

Leaning Tower

Me near the actual tower from which Galileo dropped an apple, hitting Newton on the head and leading to the invention of both impact and gravity*

Continued at The Guardian.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Travel | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on From liquid argon to M theory?

Notes from Chicago II

Posted on 13/09/2010 by lilyasquith

We’ve been in ChicagoLand for three weeks tomorrow. Haven’t made any huge contribution to the Argonne national laboratory physics program yet, but have worked out which cafeteria queue to get in to get the tall blonde lady who charges you about 2/3 as much as the small grumpy one.

Most of these sweets are illegal in the UK.

My daughter Jessie had “Lockdown practice” at school this week. This is her description of it:
Code yellow:
Meaning: there is someone outside on grounds who wants to kill you.
Action: close blinds and windows and be silent.
Code red:
Meaning: there is someone in the building who wants to kill you.
Action: turn off lights, lock doors and hide out of view. Jessie is going to get under the shelves.
Fire alarm:
If this goes off you have to stay inside the building in case it is really someone wanting you to go outside so they can shoot you.
Tornado alarm:
Go outside the lockers and get in a crouch position, look at the ground and not at anyone else.
I had to buy this much candy from 7-11 to take our minds of gunshots and masked teenagers and screaming, terrified children.

Continued at The Guardian.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Rambling, Science, Travel | Tagged | Comments Off on Notes from Chicago II

Is poor advice betraying UK science and engineering?

Posted on 10/09/2010 by Jon Butterworth

The UK is reputedly poor at capitalising on its scientific excellence. Is this due to a lack of vision in the advice given to politicians?

Crises provide opportunities, as every good manager knows.

From my point of view as a particle physicist there is a very dangerous kind of opportunist lurking in and around Whitehall. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that if swingeing cuts are made in the science budget, huge damage will be inflicted on the scientific standing and economic future of the UK. But some influential people in the science policy arena see this as an opportunity to remove an annoying anomaly – the UK’s leadership in particle physics. In particular they seem to loathe CERN, the world-leading laboratory of which the UK is a founder member.

Spirfire

Blues skies and British engineering working together.

Continued at The Guardian.

(The photograph is a Spitfire over the Wirral at Hoylake Lifeboat day.)

Posted in Politics, Science Policy | Tagged , | Comments Off on Is poor advice betraying UK science and engineering?