Light my Fire

Two figures in official-looking uniforms appear on the platform across from the control room, were I’m sitting. As soon as I realize they are coming in my direction, breathe deeply and look down at my hands. You see, I’m mentally preparing myself for a barrage of bureaucratic interrogation in French. What with me being alone in the control room on a Sunday (I’d rather sit here than in the hostel, truth be told), surely there is no Francophone colleague nearby to save me this time. Why, on earth, would they come on a Sunday?

As the two men enter, I see that “CERN Fire Brigade” is stamped across their shirts and I can’t help but notice that, weeeell, they are not unattractive. I brace myself for the French, and am shocked when the younger one says to me, in remarkably flawless English: “Hello, do you mind if we ask you a few questions?” Uh, sure?

He starts talking and it turns out his questions are not about fire escape routes, flammable chemicals, or even the pile of cardboard boxes that’s partially blocking the doorway. No, soon enough it becomes clear: it turns out he came here today to ask me about physics. I’m at a complete loss for what’s going on, but I’m still doing my best to explain the experiment.

His friend, apparently emboldened by my willingness to talk, speaks up at last: “So, wait, can you explain antimatter in simple terms?” I do my best to accommodate:

“At the Big Bang,” I start off, in the classic, grandiose way of explaining baryon asymmetry, “there were equal parts matter and antimatter…” I continue, but fear I may be loosing them when I start talking about spectroscopy. It seems, however, that they get the basics: We’re comparing one thing we know a lot about to another, anti-thing which we can barely hold on to. Pretty much. After we’re all satisfied with the physics discussion, I have some questions of my own. For example: what is going on here, anyway? Why am I sitting here, explaining hyperfine transitions to of all people, two smiling Swiss firemen?

“Well, we don’t have much to do around here on a Sunday,” the younger one says. “So we just wander around, find people, and question them.”

Good God! Why, it’s Learning For Its Own Sake. It’s taking advantage of the unique position of being a fireman at CERN with free time by chasing after wherever your curiosity beckons you to follow, and not being afraid to ask questions. It’s approaching possibly cranky physicists and wanting to listen to what they have to say. It’s evidence of active public interest in Science! It’s evidence of the inherent curiosity of the spirit! Of course I don’t let on too much, but these firemen may have just given me new hope in the human race.

“I think that’s wonderful,” I say. He, the younger one, goes on:

“We try to get people to explain in simple terms, in terms we can understand,”

“You’re doing great at that” the friend says. He adds with grin: “You pass the test.”

“Well, thank you.” In the interest of full disclosure: Here I blush. “But that’s probably mostly because I don’t understand all of it myself.” We all chuckle, they thank me again, I recommend they take a look at the semi-dismantled cryostat, and they walk out the door. With that, we all return to our own, specialized worlds.

Did that really just happen? I want to ask someone to pinch me, but of course, there’s no one here. I think I just may wander into the fire station one of these days, you know, with a couple of questions.

Corrections and Updates

Updates and Corrections to my last post:

1. the man with a gun who was shot by police at the Haas school of business died in the hospital.

2. SF Chron reports 10,000 people at on Sproul Plaza tuesday night, and order of magnitude more than my original claim of 1,000. My people estimation skills must be inept. (Or are they?) the daily saga…regrets the error?

3. Physics 105 had a discussion about the protest. It was like a dream come true, to have the opportunity to hear my classmates opinions. Scientists, they are smart folks, and they care, they really do. More on this later.

4. I quote (formatting intact) from an email sent out the entire campus from the UC Chancellor:

“To the Campus Community:

We all share the distress and anger at the State of California’s disinvestment in public higher education.

IN THE SPIRIT OF TODAY’S DAY OF ACTION, I AM URGENTLY CALLING ON THE POLITICAL LEADERSHIP FROM SACRAMENTO TO COME TO CAMPUS TO ENGAGE WITH ME AND STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES IN A PUBLIC FORUM TO DEBATE THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION.

The issues require bold action and time is short. I will inform you of the time and place as soon as possible.

Robert J. Birgeneau,
Chancellor”

4. the Occupy camp was bulldozed last night. Architecture students devised a scheme of suspending tents with balloons over the plaza.

5. I don’t know what.

The God Syntax

An excitable theorist, he’s a canine sort of lean and though I can’t tell from the back row of 1 Leconte, tall as well. Conceivably French, he’s got those square-rimmed glasses and he gestures spread-handed as he speaks: the particle that imbues all others with mass!

The LHC must be a big deal or something; I haven’t been in a colloquium this crowded since, well, since that fateful antihydrogen one last year. This time it’s all about giant magnets and smashing protons and putting limits on the mass of the Higgs. All stuff I’ve heard before but am always happy to hear again. He pauses breifly at the end of hefty part of the talk, and asks if there are any questions. Someone at the front asks something I can’t hear or don’t remember. Any more questions, the theorist asks. I have one, but I bite my tongue because I’m never really sure how to phrase it: At what point do you, um, stop looking? Do you ever stop looking? At what point do you, um, give up? At what point do you accept the invalidation of your own beliefs?

Once all vocalized inquiries are dealt with, he ends with a charming thought on the plight of the scientist. This being the type of thing that warms the cockels of physicist hearts, the  guy sitting on the aisle step in front of me takes out his pencil and copies it down. I figure (as a vigilante journalist of sorts) I may as well follow suit. I squint up at the presentation slide and read off:

“It is our responsibility to work hard and be patient and humble, in order to observe and interpret Nature as it reveals itself to us.”

It’s a lovely sentence, really. A lovely sentence, save for the errant comma that is likely a relic of translation. But “Nature?” Why did he capitalize “Nature?” I think I know–and surely, it was no error of translation.

Every Girl’s Dream…

Content Warning: mild feminism and the woes of Women in Physics

“You know, you’re part of a pretty exclusive club. there’s only about four women in the world who’ve seen trapped antihydrogen.” Clearly, he’s just extremely proud that his experiment is the only one in the world that can hold on to the fickle antiatom. After all, it’s true: there really are only four women in the world who’ve been in our control room during a successful trap. I start to feel a little proud too, until he continues:

“Statistically, you’re more likely to sleep with Brad Pitt.”

Honestly, it takes a bit of concentration to hold back my guttural instinct to vomit all over him, or at least fight the urge to take a sip of water just so that I can spit it out in disgust. He is, after all, one of the most senior people on the experiment. In hindsight such restraint was, admittedly, well played.

“You know,” I say, the sarcasm only just barely palpable, “I’m really really glad that’s the data point we’re comparing to.”

He chuckles awkwardly. End of Conversation.

Stick it to Me

Alternate title: “Why there has been no blogging for the last two weeks”

there is a part of the experiment we call “the stick”. It’s sort of a mechanical arm that vertically lowers different gadgets (a Microchannel plate, an electron gun, and a microwave horn) into the experiment. It may look sort of like a gun the terminator might use, it’s full of delicate and expensive science toys, and it lives in the trap vacuum, but overall the stick is is quite literally, a stick. So “Stick” became the name, and it stuck.

However, after the spending the last week on the front lines of the painstaking assembly of a new version of the stick, I’ve decided it might be more appropriately described as “the F****ing Stick.”

Our new stick took around 16 hours a day for five or so days straight to build. Ultra High Vacuum is a finicky thing: It is more than a little difficult to build something that cannot be touched. A single oily human fingerprint on a part that is to be put into UVH conditions outgasses (yup) and will degrade the vacuum. Enter hundreds of pair of clean nitrile gloves and more tin foil than I’ve used in all the rest of my life up until this point. AND: none of it was recycled. My “save the earth”, co oper soul was writhing in horror. Writhing in horror, that is, up until the point where it simply got too tired to care.

My work on the stick was oscillatory in relative coolness: at one moment I’d be screwing the microwave mirror into place and in the next I’d be using my bodywieght to stabilize a table as other people tightened bolts. Real thrilling stuff, experimental science. And always, in endeavors like this, there were speed bumps. Holes in the plans. Miscommunication between us and the machinist. Re-purposing of parts. Accidental misalignment, which calls for much dreaded redoing.

Worst of all throughout this entire process was the fact that I had to let least fifty potentially brilliant “that’s what she said” jokes about the F***ing stick simply dissolve into air because, well, I’m the only girl around and well, these are really distinguished physicists and well, it would awkward.

Despite all this (I admit it) whining, it turns out I’d only come in last minute on the saga of the (F****ing) Stick. Walter is a Canadian Professor, a superconductor physicist, and one hell of an on the fly machinist. He’s also actually retired and is volunteering his time at CERN. Retired, but you sure as heck wouldn’t know it from the way he runs around the lab or skillfully machines any part to make a ‘chewing gum solution’ a reality at odd hours of the night and day. Walter has been designing and helping realize the stick since February. Let’s just stay, the stick has been a long  time in the making.

And so by last night I found myself several days deep in the trenches of the war against the stick, running out of food, clean clothes and sanity. Not to mention: pushed to physical exhaustion and sufficiently and embarrassingly out-lapped by a 70 year old man.

Last night the F***ing Stick was completed and lowered into the unpumped experiment with a large crane and a lot of fanfare (by physics standards). We did the alignment of the instruments this morning and the pumpout of the vacuum systems this afternoon. I can now also proudly say that I’ve screwed down a flange (that’s what she said).

Finally this evening I was released from duty after only eight hours on, and despite the exhaustion I somewhat recklessly began entertaining the idea of riding into the mountains for a bit before riding home. All hopes of this were damped significantly however, when I was randomly stung by a wasp on my middle finger of my right hand as I was walking from the control room to the office. A brief shot of hot pain pulsed up my hand, my finger began to swell, and I suddenly remembered that I’d never been stung before and had no idea whether or not I was allergic. Five minutes passed and I wasn’t dead, so I figured I was alright.

I took the sting as a sign it was time to just ride home, for goodness sake. I made it home before the store closed so I could buy some food.

Phew.

that has such people in it

It’s always, hard, at first, to get over how much physics colloquium smells like old men. But then, looking around you think: It’s hardly a wonder.

Alan Guth is the picture of everything I’d imagined Alan Guth to be. His glasses are thick rimmed and thick glassed, his mouth is big lipped and his fine grey hair neatly combed. He walks unevenly although his voice is remarkably measured, assured.

He’s talking about inflation—the rapid expansion of the early Universe—a theory he came up with twenty years ago. Showing us the much-beloved power spectra of the CMB anisotropies produced from the WMAP results with the theoretical prediction considering inflation also plotted (a near perfect match), he remarks that this, this is his favorite graph in the entire world.  Inflation: it seems to work. But soon Guth has turned to string theory is asking us all to envision something larger than our universe: a landscape of many universes, pocketed within each other, each with its own physics: Its own , its own cosmological constant. All of them are exotic with respect to each other and with our Universe (and galaxy (and solar system (and planet (and epoch)))), where everything seems to be just so.

Consider the fragility of life on Earth (and the fragility of life in the solar system (and the galaxy (and the Universe (and the multiverse)))). This soggy, bacterial globe is nothing short of miraculous; like negative pressure material. The Physics we have invented is astoundingly beautiful, but it pales in comparison to the natural world.

It’s 5 PM in 1 Leconte Hall, and I’m floored by the sound of my own exhalation.

LaTeX

A thirty minute download, a three hour learning curve, and one half of a lab report later: my life just got a whole lot easier because I can now know how to type stuff like this. Ironic, but wonderful.

the world (or at least the universe) is flat

“Hello! Anybody out there?“

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11810553

Read the article, or read the highlights:

“Even though gravity holds that everything should attract everything else, in every direction astronomers look there is evidence that things are in fact moving apart – with those objects further away moving faster.” There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line…

“Dark energy is believed to pervade the essence of space and time, forcing a kind of  ‘anti-gravity’ that fits cosmologists’ equations but that is otherwise a mysterious quantity.” A member of my family told me this Thanksgiving that he wants me to invent a switch that will turn off the Earth’s gravitational field.

“The team’s conclusions suggest the Universe is indeed flat, an idea first put forth by Albert Einstein…” Einstein, your badassedness never ceases to amaze and astound.

the best one of all, having absolutely nothing to do with science: “Alan Heavens, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh…” With a name like that, how could you aspire to be anything else?

“I don’t think it can tell us in a lot of detail what the dark energy is,” Professor Heavens said. “I think it’s probably not precise enough – certainly not yet.”

Conclusion: As usual, we have very little idea what the heck is going. Isn’t it fantastic?

the face of God

96 % of the Universe looks like this—except we can’t see it, at least not optically. It’s Dark Matter/Energy. When lifetimes upon lifetimes are spent studying the physics of laws that may only apply to a small, small fraction of what’s out there, you begin to wonder: What if the bigger questions, the ones we can’t answer or even see—aren’t meant for science? At a certain point, all truth is reduced to belief.

nobelpriset – not for me

A Drama. Location: Physics 111 Laboratory. Time: earlier today.

Me: I don’t think this potentiometer is working. I am varying the resistance… and look… nothing happens!

Lab Instructor: Well, go get a new op-amp. That one could be burned out.

Me: (dumbfounded) Oh… ok (fetches a new op-amp)

Lab Instructor: Put it in.

(I pull out the old omp-amp, and attempt to throw it away… but the pointy metal leads coming out of it puncture my skin, causing the op-amp to now be inserted INTO MY FINGER as opposed to into the circuit.)

Me: Ouch!!!!! (shaking finger, trying to loose the little bugger of an integrated circuit from it’s grasp IN MY FINGER)

Lab Instructor: …….

(he clearly has no sympathy.)

(I insert the new Op-Amp. The circuit works.)

Lab instructor: Yup. That was it. (He walks away as quickly as he can).

———————

But in real science news: The Nobel Prize for physics was awarded yesterday. The Royal academy gave it to two Russian dudes working at the University of Manchester who developed graphene—a material that is one atom thick and strong enough to hold the weight of a truck applied over the point of a pencil. Apparently they discovered it with the help of scotch tape (that’s how all good science is done). Rumor has it they’ve upgraded the type of tape they’re using to something stronger, more reliable, which raises the question: where the heck is the Nobel Prize for the guy who invented duct tape? Talk about changing the world.

Interesting too, is the Swedish Royal Academy’s decision to give the prize to graphene, and thereby turning the eyes of the scientific community even more in the direction of Nanotechnology … precisely on the eve of the impending construction of ESS (research facility creating neutrons for Nanotechnology research) in Lund, in Skåne, in Sweden.

Oj då!