Angels and Positrons

So we will shortly be having another film based on another Dan Brown book: Angels and Demons. I'll say now that I have neither read the book of or seen the film of The Da Vinci Code and have not read Angels and Demons and strongly doubt I will watch the film. Nothing personal, but I only have my allotted span and suspect I would rather avoid spending the requisite hours getting annoyed.

Anyway, the plot of the forthcoming film involves antimatter created at CERN (and, so I understand, a man-portable antimatter bomb), and members of the cast and production team have recently made a publicity trip to CERN itself. Seeing as the people at CERN know a thing or two about antimatter (yes, it does exist and, yes, they do create it at CERN) they have a web page explaining some of the science, which was initially published a few years back (after the book came out) and has been updated more recently. Great stuff.

The Definite Particle

Well, we have a beam going all the way around, yay! Looking at the grid monitoring systems our site is still up and running. All good.

Actually, not much work is being done here at RAL — there is a big area in one of the other buildings with a couple of screens showing News24, and this is full of people drinking coffee and eating cake. Elsewhere on site, many of the people not down there have live news coming out of radios and PCs in their offices.

This really is a big deal. While we are some way off actually having any serious results coming out of the LHC (they need to get a beam circulating in the other direction, then get collisions happening, and then ramp the energy levels up to the point where the exciting stuff can actually happen), the media coverage has been phenomenal and despite the rubbish being spouted about the end of the world, we are actually seeing some good mainstream science coverage. It's really difficult to explain just how cool this is, but I think this will probably have the significance of (or exceeding) the moon landings. Only time will tell.

I'm just chuffed (and humbled) to actually be a very tiny part of this experiment. I wish I understood it better, but it's a good incentive to do some more studying.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Hadron

I finally got home from Geneva at about midnight on Friday, after an OK trip — once again BA didn't lose my luggage at T5, although for a while it looks like it had. Just as I was about to go to the enquiries desk, there appeared my little case packed with dirty clothes.

The week was interesting, though a lot of the content of the meetings went over my head. Probably the most useful aspect was getting to meet and chat with a load of the UK grid people (including several who work at the same site as me) who I will be working with over the coming months and years.

We ate well too, including a stonking steak at Cafe de l'Aviation, a veal saute thingie at a great little bistro in a back street, a proper Italian-style pizza laden with fish, and my first ever steak tartare, which was really very nice. Unfortunately no fondue this time though.

As pretty much expected I didn't get to have a proper look around CERN. It would have been great to look into one of the experiment caverns, but them's the breaks. They've already started to cool the ring down (it'll get below 2K over the next few weeks, so darn cold!) and are planning to fireup the first beams later in the summer, so I think the chances of getting a real look are diminishing now. It's all very exciting stuff though. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of press coverage later in the year, though it'll be some time before the LHC is running at full power.