In Bonn, we have been putting on a physics show for kids aged 10 and older for 8 years. It is a show full of exciting live experiments. The shows have typically covered most of classical physics and are supposed to be entertaining and of course also educational.
Continued at The Guardian.
See also Chapter 3.7 of Smashing Physics.
Detailed software models of particle physics detectors are an essential part of designing and using them. GEANT, the huge open-source software project developed for them, is also used for space and medical applications
Continued at The Guardian.
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.
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.
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.
