Posts Tagged cern
How I got to work at CERN (video) and some rambling about video (text)
Posted by Angela Brett in Story Time on April 2, 2022
Right before JoCo Cruise 2020, I bought a 256GB SD card, just as a treat, so I wouldn’t have to worry about switching between 64GB cards and offloading videos to my Mac when recording as many events as possible. I discovered too late that my camera (a Nikon P7700) was too old to support 256GB cards, and when I got home from the cruise we were in lockdown, so I couldn’t return the card. This ultimately led to my buying a new camera (a Sony ZV-1) in late 2021 which would support the card, and I am very happy with this application of the sunk cost fallacy.
I planned to test out the camera at a Burning Hell show in Vienna (which would have been my first in-person concert since the cruise), but Austria went back into lockdown, so instead, I recorded myself talking about how I got to work at CERN, as a sequel to That time Steve Wozniak bought me a laptop and That time Steve Wozniak taught me to Segway and then played Tetris and pranks through a concert. I recorded 36 minutes continuously, in 4K, and I ran out of things to say before the camera had to stop for any reason. My old camera would have to stop after less than 30 minutes recording in 1080p, due to the 4GB file size limit, so I’ll call that a success.
Whether my 36 minutes of talking about my route to CERN is worth watching is up to you to decide:
The video is fully closed-captioned by me, a human, so if you prefer skimming text to watching videos, click the … symbol (at the end of the line below the title) and choose Open Transcript.
The Burning Hell are making another attempt at a Vienna show in September, so here’s hoping I can run that original experimental design.
I’ve since been on JoCo Cruise 2022, and found the camera much less stress than my old one for recording concerts. I not only don’t need to change the card as often, I’m also not limited to 4GB files, or by the battery capacity, since it can use an external battery pack. So I’ve recorded most events continuously. The new camera also shows me what it’s focussing on, and I can change that using the touch screen, so from what I’ve seen so far, I haven’t had any incidents of an entire video being out of focus.
The only issue I had with the new camera is that if I start recording video immediately after turning it on, it doesn’t show it’s recording for another second or so, so I’d often press the button again and inadvertently stop recording in my attempt to start recording. In most cases I realised what had happened immediately and start recording again, but in one case I didn’t notice for a while and missed the introduction of a performer.
I used to do most of my lightweight cruise video editing in QuickTime Player, but for whatever reason its ‘Split Clip’ option is disabled for the videos from my new camera, so I’m trying out LosslessCut. It has a few issues, but I’ve found workarounds for them. One great thing about it is when I cut a show into individual parts, it can not only export those parts as individual videos, but also give me a list of times for those parts. I can paste them into the YouTube description of the full video so that they show up as chapters.
With the help of to that feature, I’m uploading most of them as full shows with chapter markers, and putting them into a playlist of the whole cruise as I do so. I’m also splitting shows into individual songs/stories/questions when relevant, and uploading those as separate videos, so I can add the individual pieces to other relevant playlists. Look in the description of any of the full-show videos to find a link to a playlist of the individual parts of the show. It will take a while to get everything processed and uploaded, so subscribe or check back later to see more.
Another thing I did (and recorded some video of) during that trip was marry Joey Marianer, but that can have its own blog post later. If you’re impatient, you can check out the Joey-Angela Merger playlist.
Welcome, McFly. Seriously.
Posted by Angela Brett in Culture on October 20, 2015
I arrived in October 21 2015 about an hour ago, and Marty McFly should be arriving later. It seems a good time to recap a few things I’ve made and done relating to Back to the Future.
Firstly, here are some lyrics I wrote for a Back-to-the-Future-related parody of Moxy Früvous’s Gulf War Song. If I’d been in Vienna more this year I probably would have fixed the bit I don’t like (the heavy/light line that needs too much explanation) and organised for some of my musical friends to sing it at Open Phil, but alas, I’ve been away too much.
Secondly, here’s a video I took of a superconducting magnetic hover-scooter created by MaNEP several years ago and occasionally shown off at events at CERN. I’m not too happy about the way I deliberately decoupled the sound from the video at one point, but never mind. You can see me riding a hoverboard. I wrote a blog post with more information.
In the year 2015, I bought one of those holographic hats that everyone’s wearing here in the future, took it to the wax museum in Vienna, and took some pictures of wax figures wearing it. Here’s a guy who could help you solve any problems you might have caused with the spacetime continuum.
And this is Michael Jackson… Fox? ready to serve you at your nearest Cafe 80s.
Of course, Elvis never died; he just skipped a few decades.
Same goes for Freddie Mercury:
The Freud dude prefers to travel in time by phone booth, though.
Gustav Klimt probably thought he knew how colour worked.
And here are Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp, just because.
Also, check out these songs other people wrote about Back to the Future. Like an Anvil by The Burning Hell (from the album ‘Flux Capacitor’) and one simply called Back to the Future by Insane Ian.
Have fun; I’ll be going to a screening of Jaws 19 (or is it Back to the Future I and II?) with my hat and my copy of the Back to the Future card game.
I look forward to seeing whether this tumblr continues as normal after it’s actually correct.
Haiku Detector Achieves its Purpose (and will now proceed to have an existential crisis)
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on October 19, 2014
I originally wrote Haiku Detector because my friend Gry saw Times Haiku and wondered whether there were any haiku in her Ph. D. thesis. The other day I heard back about the haiku she found. It turns out that even the title of the thesis is a haiku:
Developments for
studies of the extremes of
nuclear matter
Here’s another one, which could be about anything. The last line is a bit of an anticlimax.
As of today, the
origin of this strength is
not well understood.
When I read this one, I wondered if miniball was a mini-golf style version of another ball game:
At HIE-ISOLDE
the MINIBALL would be used
for the same purpose.
The impurities
of 48,50Ti
are easily seen.
After seeing these, I sent her the as-yet-unreleased new version of Haiku Detector, which can detect haiku made up of several sentences. Having mostly had my name on papers authored by the entire CMS collaboration, I expected her to find a lot of haiku in the author list. But ISOLDE is much smaller, and also this is her thesis that she wrote, not some paper whose author list she got tacked onto. So she got some from references:
Kitatani, S.
Goko, H. Toyokawa,
K. Yamada, T.
C 47,
537
(1993).
and some things with section numbers tacked on:
2.1.1
Open shell nuclei and
collective models
This matrix is the
starting point for the Oslo
method. 45
That last one has so many possibilities. I like to think of it as being about an electronic band called The Oslo Method which released a 45rpm record about The Matrix. Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the haiku is. You have to see it for yourself. And indeed, you can see the other haiku she found on the #MyHaikuThesis tag on Twitter.
I noticed something interesting while writing this post — some of the ‘haiku’ Gry found include gamma (γ) symbols:
The γ-ray strength functions
display no strong enhancement
for low γ energies.
5.2.3
Particle energy-γ-ray
energy matrix
Haiku Detector on her Mac has treated them as having zero syllables, as if they are not pronounced, and I think I recall characters like that not being pronounced in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. But I just checked on my Mac running Mac OS X Yosemite, and the speech synthesis (which Haiku Detector relies on for syllable counting) pronounces γ as ‘Greek small letter gamma’, so Haiku Detector does not find those erroneous haiku. I think that this might be a new feature in Yosemite.
But here’s where it gets weird: you’d think that it’s just reading ‘Greek small letter gamma’ because that’s the unicode name of the character. I tried with a few emoji and other special characters, and that hypothesis is upheld. But the unicode character named ‘chicken’ (🐔) is pronounced ‘chicken head’. Spooky. Another strange thing is that there is no unicode ‘duck’ character.
If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know why I happened to come across those oddities. I’ll have to investigate them later, though; right now I’m in Edinburgh for NSScotland, and it’s about time I looked at some tourism information.
So, Haiku Detector; what now? Maybe look for supersymmetric haiku?
Update: It seems that in Mac OS X 10.8, γ is not pronounced, and 🐔 is pronounced ‘chicken emoji’. Other emoji also have ’emoji’ in their pronunciations, while still others are not pronounced. I wonder if pronunciations were added (and later edited to remove the ’emoji’) for certain emoji, and now the default pronunciation has changed from nothing to the unicode name. So ‘🐔’ ended up with the explicit pronunciation ‘chicken head’ while others which were not previously pronounced use their unicode names. So this should be a haiku in Yosemite, though for some reason Haiku Detector does not detect it:
🐒🐔
🐔🐒🐒
🍄🍄🐍
Nine of Hearts: ISS vs. LHC update
Posted by Angela Brett in CERN, Space Shuttle, Writing Cards and Letters on June 4, 2013
A while ago I made a somewhat whimsical but as accurate as I could manage too-much-infographic comparing many aspects of the International Space Station with the Large Hadron Collider, and jokingly asking which would win in a fight. I’ve given that a bit of an update and put an annotated text version below for those whose pdf readers don’t show annotations. More importantly, since then, I’ve seen the crew of the STS-134 mission to the space station give a talk at CERN, and wanted to ask them which was more awesome, but was in one of the few spots without a microphone, and I don’t speak as loudly as my friend Hugo, who asked a question from right next to me, does. But at a later talk at CERN, I did ask NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, William H. Gerstenmaier. This was his response, which you can find at around 50:45 in the video:
Oh, man. This is a tough question; I don’t know. They’re both unique in their own way, right? Both pretty special research facilities, right? And I think that, again we often talk about, you know, human versus robotic, right, it’s really human all the time, right? Even in a robotic space, the data’s analyzed by a human somewhere, and so, I think again it’s that spirit of exploration that we’re all pushing on. We all want to understand something new, discover something that nobody’s seen before, so at CERN, damn sure, that spirit drives you every day, you’re looking for new things. I see it in your papers: what is this theory? Are we changing physics? It’s the same thing we’re doing. How can I look at a physical phenomenon that occurs in one gravity, remove the one gravity term, and now get a totally different perspective on that same physical phenomenon, that then allows me to advance in a different area. So I think it’s that same passion that drives people. But I don’t know which one’s best.
So there you go. I’ve added this comment to the notes in the TMIGraphic, and also updated data relating to the ISS’s orbit and a few other things, and added a ‘Getting to Orbit’ section, but the best thing is the update to that ‘when to see it’ bubble on the LHC. You can see it at the CERN open days at the end of September. Two full days. The LHC is shut down for upgrades at the moment, so I understand this will be another chance to actually go underground and see it, which probably won’t be possible for a while once it starts running again. And even if you don’t see the LHC or its detectors (there are only so many people that you can get up and down in a lift in two days; 23 000 people out of 53 000 visitors visited the tunnels in one day last time), there are many other things you can see at the open day. I know this because I was at the last one. Maybe I should look through whatever videos I took that day and see if I can make an interesting montage. I know I have footage from various other tours which I should put online.
The pdf version of the ISS vs. LHC comparison has a lot of links and extra notes in the margins detailing where I got the figures from, how I chose the sources, how I found myself gingerly plugging values into a relativistic equation at a demoparty at 1:30a.m, and so on. But I suspect not everyone who looked at the original downloaded the pdf, and those who did might not have been using pdf readers that showed the notes well. Besides that, the infographic is sort of messy (that’s why I call it a too-much-infographic), although I think it does add something to the raw text. So I’ll reproduce all of the text and notes in table format below, show a far-too-small preview of the TMIGraphic version, and encourage you to download the pdf if you like circles and crisscrossing dashed lines and things that can be read while offline.
Sorry if the line spacing is inconsistent in this table; WordPress changes the style for the second and later paragraphs in each cell no matter how I create the paragraph breaks, and it tends to delete newlines, paragraph and break tags if I ever open the page in the visual editor, so the best I can do is put blank lines before the first paragraph in each cell to give that the same style, and then try not to accidentally open the post in the visual editor.
| Aspect | ISS | LHC | Notes |
| Physical Characteristics | |||
| Size |
Solar array: 73m Truss: 109m Modules: 51m |
Dipole magnets: Cold mass diameter: 0.57m Vacuum vessel diameter: 0.91m Length: 15m See the ‘Orbit’ section for the size of the entire LHC. |
Source for ISS size |
| Mass | 419 455kg (but it depends what’s up there) | 37 600 000kg (cold mass) 35 200kg (detector mass, not counting MoEDAL) |
The ISS mass doesn’t include the contents of the station or any spacecraft docked to it. You’ll find different masses around the place depending on what they take into account.The LHC mass is much more than that (calculated from CERN FAQ – LHC the guide: “4700 tonnes of material in each of the eight sectors”.) The 1232 35-tonne dipole magnets alone weigh 43120 tonnes, and there are another 8468 smaller magnets, and many other things. But only 30 tonnes of each of those dipoles is cooled (by 120 tonnes of liquid helium and 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen) As my friend Rob Lambert (who works on LHCb) says: It's difficult to define the mass of "the LHC", because you'd probably want to weigh the concrete in the tunnel walls […] I think the "cold mass" is the best comparison to make, since that is sort of like the LHC payload. The rest is sort of comparable to the shuttles/boosters used to get the materiel up to the space station, which weighs a lot more than the station itself, of course. |
| Weight |
368 730 000N (just the cold stuff, ignoring altitude) |
at least 3 614 899N (using the stated mass at 422km altitude, the point of the ISS’s current orbit where it weighs the least) |
For the LHC, this is just a simple matter of multiplying the mass above with standard gravity. The exact gravity where the LHC is wouldn’t be exactly that, due to the altitude, the distance below the surface, the mountains, the tides (which the LHC itself is sensitive can detect) and all sorts of other things that I don’t know how to calculate.As for the ISS, you might think the station is weightless, but it’s not; it’s in orbit. There’s still gravity up there, just a bit weaker than on the ground (where the station would weigh about 4 109 084N.) The station’s weight keeps it falling toward the Earth all the time. It’s just moving along fast enough that the Earth curves away beneath it, so it doesn’t get any closer to the ground. Things on the station seem weightless because they’re in free fall.Here’s a website which gives the formulas to calculate the force of gravity between two objects, and will calculate it for you. I used 5.97219e21 metric tons for the weight of the Earth, 419455kg for the weight of the station, and 6800km for the distance between them (the radius of the Earth, plus 422km.) I probably shouldn’t give the result that many significant figures. |
| Pressure | Inside: 760Torr (1 atm) Outside: 10-10 — 5×10-8 Torr |
For the ISS, this is actually the pressure at 500km; the closest altitude I could find authoritative-enough figures for. Outside the station, closer to Earth’s atmosphere, the value should be toward the high end of this range.I had a lot of trouble finding an answer to this seemingly-simple question; I found figures which varied by a factor of a billion. In fact it only varies by a factor of 20 depending on the space weather. | |
| Temperature | Inside: ~24°C Outside: -157—121°C |
Inside: -271.3°C Outside: ~20°C Lead collision point: 5.5 trillion °C |
When I first did this comparison, it was possible to check the inside temperature of the space station in real time here at the bottom right, but the temperature doesn’t show for me any more.The inside temperature of the LHC is the temperature of the cold mass of the magnets, given here.The ‘Outside’ temperature is actually the temperature of the LHCb cavern when the detector is turned off. I assume the LHC tunnel should be about the same temperature. 5.5 trillion degrees is an estimate from this Nature blog post. This CERN page says: When two beams of lead ions collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space. |
| Power | 84kW from solar arrays |
120MW from French and Swiss grid (including the base load for the whole site) |
Of the LHC total, LHC cryogenics uses 27.5 MW and the LHC experiments use 22 MW. It’s hard to say how much of the rest goes toward LHC-related computing, lighting, coffee-brewing etc, and how much goes to the many other experiments and activities at CERN. |
| Orbit and Altitude | |||
| Altitude | 408km — 422km (on 2 June 2013. Has been as low as 331.5km) |
175m — 50m below ground about 450m—380m above sea level |
Here is a nice graph of the ISS’s altitude from launch to 2009. Here’s the source for the LHC depth figures, and an explanation of why it was built underground. I estimated the altitude above sea level going by altitudes in Google Earth at roughly the points where the LHC is deepest and shallowest. I need to find better figures for this. |
| Orbit Diameter | 13 558—13 586km (on 2 June 2013) |
8485m | I used the mean Earth radius of 6371km to calculate the orbit diameter of the ISS, . I guess I should have calculated the diameter at the actual angle the ISS orbits at, but as a maths major I don’t trust my arithmetic. |
| Orbital Speed | 7 666.2m/s (on 2 June 2012) |
protons at 7TeV: 299 792 455m/s (3m/s slower than the speed of light) lead ions at 2.76 TeV per nucleon: 299 792 441m/s (17m/s slower than the speed of light) |
You can check the ISS orbital speed in real time. Protons haven’t circulated in the LHC at 7TeV yet, but they will. I got the 2.76TeV figure from the LHC FAQ document (which is very comprehensive and interesting, by the way. I recommend it.) A nucleon is just a proton or neutron. But I couldn’t find the actual speed, so I calculated it using this formula at 1:30a.m. I’m a maths major, so I can’t guarantee its correctness. Wolfram Alpha can calculate this by itself if you ask it ‘relativistic speed of 2.76 TeV proton’ but the answer is so near to the speed of light that it rounds it off to 1c. |
| Orbital Period | ~92 minutes |
88.928µs (11245 orbits per second) either protons or lead ions at full energy |
The ISS data used to be on the real-time tracking page listed previously, and the LHC figures were here. I’m going to need to find new sources for those. |
| Getting to Orbit | Zarya and Zvezda modules launched by Proton rockets Pirs and Poisk launched by Soyuz-U rockets Everything else launched by Space Shuttle with the help of its solid rocket boosters | Protons accelerated by Linac 2, then the Proton Synchrotron Booster, the Proton Synchrotron, Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally the LHC | It’s all about protons and boosters. I’m all about tenuous connections and dubious puns. |
| Particle Detectors | |||
| Detectors | AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) Calibrated using proton beam Real data from cosmic rays |
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
AMS was designed at CERN, and one of those proton beams came from the Super Proton Synchrotron, which also accelerates protons to inject them into the Large Hadron Collider (see also the bottom half of the too-much-infographic.) The AMS control room is also at CERN.For a while the AMS was just across the road from my office. I took a few pictures of it just before it left, with my phone since my camera was broken at the time. One is shown below. The astronauts who installed it gave a talk at CERN a year after the installation, which you can watch online. |
| TOTEM In development |
|||
| LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
|||
| MoEDAL (The Monopole & Exotics Detector at the LHC) In development |
|||
| ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
|||
| LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward) Simulating cosmic rays using proton beam |
|||
| ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Calibrated using cosmic rays Real data from proton beam |
|||
| Construction | |||
| Countries Involved | 16 | 111 | The International Space Station’s Facebook page and also the International Cooperation page say 15 nations. NASA’s Human Space Flight FAQ says 16. I went with the higher number, because people from other countries are probably involved anyway. I know that at CERN, it’s usually the countries of the institutions that are counted, when there might be people from many other countries working for those institutions. Here is a list of countries involved in CERN. As a maths major, I don’t trust my counting abilities, so I got the 111 figure from the LHC UK site. As explained above, the real number is probably higher. |
| Conceived |
1976 (Mir-2) 1984 (Freedom) 1986 (Columbus) 1993 (ISS) |
1984 | Here’s an interesting document on the conception of the ISS, which was essentially the coming together of several separate space station projects. The idea for the LHC (sometimes called the Juratron in early papers, after the Jura mountains) had been floating around since 1977 (see this talk by Lyn Evans for a nice history of the LHC) but 1984 was the date of the first conference about it. The idea was officially approved in 1994. |
| On-site Assembly | 1998—2013 | 1998—2008 | Of course, this depends what you count. The LHC date is from the start of civil engineering to the completion of the beam pipe around the entire circuit including the detectors. There was a huge repair effort after the cooling leak in 2008, and there’s work going on right now to upgrade the detectors and get the LHC itself up to the original design energy of 7TeV. |
| Operational Since | 2000 (first astronauts) |
2008 (first beam) 2009 (first collisions) |
|
| Operational Until | 2020 | 2022 (after which it will be upgraded) |
Some sources say the ISS could run till 2025 or 2028, but for now it’s officially funded until 2020. There are so many plans for upgrades and successors to the LHC that I’m a little confused as to when the LHC itself actually shuts off, but I’m going by the diagram in this article. |
| Estimated Budget |
$72.4billion in 2010 dollars unofficial calculation, not counting shuttle missions |
CHF6 billion | Having a real-life space station occupied continuously for nearly 13 years, and finding out what the universe is made of? Priceless! For the LHC, the figure of 4.6 billion is given here, but I chose the CERN FAQ/LHC Guide as the reference since it is newer and probably more carefully checked by more people. This was the booklet given out to volunteers at the 2008 open day. |
| Transport | |||
| To/From |
Shuttles driven by ISS personnel (Kennedy Space Center to/from ISS, 1998—2011) Soyuz driven by ISS personnel (Baikonur Cosmodrome to/from ISS, 2000—present) |
Powered flight (Geneva Airport to/from any airport on Earth) Shuttle driven by ISS personnel (Geneva Airport to/from CERN Meyrin site) |
Here is a picture of an ISS employee driving a CERN shuttle: |
| Around | Unpowered flight | Shuttles driven by ISS personnel between various CERN sites | |
| Unmanned cargo transport |
H-II Transfer Vehicle (Tanegashima Space Center to/from ISS) Progress (Baikonur Cosmodrome to/from ISS) Automated Transfer Vehicle (Guiana Space Center to/from ISS) |
ROCLA magnet transport robots Magnet alignment robots |
I saw an explanation of the CERN robots at an event in Microcosm years ago, but haven’t been able to find much information on them online. |
| Outcomes | |||
| Challenges Faced |
|
The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread. | |
| Science | 121 “International Space Station” papers on arxiv.org |
more than 1000 “Large Hadron Collider” papers on arxiv.org | The paper count for ISS is from August 2012; when I checked again in June 2013, the count was 116, but I assume the other papers still exist. In any case, this is only a rough idea of how much science has been done with the help of the ISS. It shouldn’t be taken as a serious estimate of the benefits thereof. |
| Fiction | Only fictional space stations can destroy a planet with an energy beam. | Only fictional particle accelerators can destroy a planet with their energy beams. | I haven’t even seen Star Wars and I still managed to get a reference in. |
| Spinoffs |
|
|
You can see more about NASA technology spinoffs, search for NASA technology available for licensing, or find out about CERN technology transfer. |
| When to see it | As it passes overhead just before dawn or just after sunset | When it’s not running; ideally the 2013 Open Days. | If you set your location and follow @twisst on Twitter, you can be notified whenever there will be a visible ISS pass in your area.You can see CERN’s other exhibitions, or book guided tours at any time. |
| Overall | |||
| Awesomeness |
★★★★★ Most awesome man-made thing in Earth orbit. Don’t make me compare it with Mars rovers. |
★★★★★ Most awesome man-made thing on Earth. |
They’re both unique in their own way, right? Both pretty special research facilities, right? […] I think again it’s that spirit of exploration that we’re all pushing on. We all want to understand something new, discover something that nobody’s seen before, so at CERN, damn sure, that spirit drives you every day, you’re looking for new things. I see it in your papers: what is this theory? Are we changing physics? It’s the same thing we’re doing. How can I look at a physical phenomenon that occurs in one gravity, remove the one gravity term, and now get a totally different perspective on that same physical phenomenon, that then allows me to advance in a different area. So I think it’s that same passion that drives people. But I don’t know which one’s best. — William H. Gerstenmaier at CERN on 6 November 2012 |
Four of Hearts: Nucleosynthesis (rapidly processed)
Posted by Angela Brett in Periodic Table, Writing Cards and Letters on April 14, 2013
Oft upon a spacetime,
a red star gets the blues
and puffs up like a superstar
with nothing left to fuse.
Pushing hot and heavy,
it finds its stellar rise
affords a new and rapid way
to nucleosynthesise.
Squirts new heavy ions
to interstellar dust
then collapses in and pulls some back
and into stellar crust.
Newly Lilliputian,
compressed by weight of all
our star invites its nearest friends
to join the neutron ball.
Millimetre mountains
on kilometres-round
neutron star where mass of more
than one Earth Sun is bound.
Heart a seething chaos,
skin so smooth and hard,
beneath the skin, too densely packed
to tell each piece apart.
Love-crossed star starts dancing
with friend who heard the call:
another star-crossed lover,
another neutron ball.
They pull each other closer,
spin fast, and by and by,
they kiss in bursts of gamma rays
and heavy nuclei.
Once upon a planet
of star-fused chemistry
some humans sought to learn of how
their atoms came to be:
Made their own large nuclides
used traps to measure mass,
then calculated where they’d fit
in star’s electron gas.
Nuclides so unstable
they fall apart on Earth,
at pressure, they survive in dead
star hotbed’s upper berth:
Isotopes of nickel,
and lots of iron too,
zinc-80 (deeper than we thought)
But no zinc-82.
Once upon a line graph,
those data points could show,
a hint of where and when and how
big elements may grow.
Is it supernovas,
or casanovas’ kiss?
Is it neither? Some of both?
And what else did we miss?
Probed big atoms’ origins,
but all their parents knew:
My daughter works in science labs;
don’t ask me what they do!
Tried to tell the physicists
but all that students knew:
zinc-80 (deeper than they thought)
and no zinc-82.
This is my understanding (as a mere mathematician/code monkey) of the cover story of this month’s CERN Courier. I picked up a copy on Friday evening on the way out of work, and decided I could interview people I know in ISOLDE and write an article about it in 400 words or fewer in order to apply for an editorial trainee scheme at New Scientist magazine, since applications weren’t due until Monday and I needed a writing project for the weekend anyway. Once I’d read the article and enough supporting material to understand it, I realised I probably wouldn’t end up writing the article. I wasn’t sure I really understood the significance of it, I didn’t have access to the original paper from home, and what’s more, the result was a month and a half old, which is far too old, according to New Scientist’s freelancing guidelines. It might work for getting an internship at Old Scientist, but I probably wouldn’t like that because I’m the editor-in-chief at Old Scientist and I’d probably treat my interns poorly.
Anyhow, I decided I’d just appoint myself New Scientist’s, or maybe the CERN Courier’s, unofficial contributing troubadour, and write poems about their feature articles. If Popular Science can have a contributing troubadour, so can New Scientist. So, certain I couldn’t adequately explain ISOLTRAP’s result in 400 words or fewer, I set about writing a poem about it, which came out at 302 words. I tackled it rather longitudinally though; it doesn’t go much into the specifics (or even mention the r-process or ISOLTRAP by name) and occasionally I may sacrifice clarity for rhythm or puns, but I tried to give all the context needed to have some kind of understanding of the final result. This article is probably easier to understand than the CERN Courier one. One of the many interesting things I learnt while researching this is that stars actually get the blues before going supernova.
Eight of Diamonds: ISS vs. LHC (a comparison)
Posted by Angela Brett in Kennedy Space Center on September 12, 2012
Here is a handy, sometimes whimsical (but always as accurate as I could manage) comparison between two of my favourite scientific endeavours (now version 1.1, with changes detailed in a new post, along with a HTML table version with all the notes visible.) It is too cluttered with information to be a good infographic, so I’m calling it a TMIGraphic. Click on the image for a higher-resolution pdf with links and copious notes. It’s best if you save it and open it in a pdf reader rather than viewing it in your web browser, as the notes didn’t show up in the browser I tried. Click on each information box for the primary or most readable reference, and click the note icons for more explanations, references and interesting links. If you can’t see the note icons in the pdf, or if clicking on them doesn’t do anything, let me know and I’ll try to figure something out; the notes are important.
I’ve wanted to do this for at least three years
; I think it started with wondering which was cooler, and immediately answering myself with the relevant temperatures. When I started this round of Writing Cards (and not so much Letters) I thought I’d work on it slowly throughout the year, then finish it when the appropriate cards came up in one of the NASA decks and the CERN deck in the same week. This didn’t work for two reasons: every time I started to work on it slowly (and also, when I first came up with the idea of doing it as an infographic a year or so ago) I got stuck on the vacuum pressure outside the ISS. And even though the week’s CERN card is about LINAC-1, the NASA card seemed like a challenge that I couldn’t resist. Is the International Space Station really the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program ever attempted? Well, I don’t want to choose a favourite. Let’s just say the Large Hadron Collider is the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program on Earth, and the ISS is the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program in space.
This took longer than my usual deadline of a week, but not through procrastination. Also not so that it would be released four years and two days after the first beam went through the LHC, though I’ll use that as an excuse if it helps. Almost every one of those numbers took quite a bit of effort to get right, and you’ll see in the notes in the pdf (that’s the old pdf, corresponding to the TMIGraphic pictured; here‘s the most recent one) that most of them come with various caveats and explanations, because nothing is simple. I’ll have to update some pages in wikipedia after this. I’m certain I still have some things wrong; maybe some obvious things. Please point them out, and I’ll fix them in the next version. Also, feel free to tell me how bad my layout is, iff you have a better suggestion. I know this is not perfect yet and I intend to keep working on it. If you have ideas of information to add, I’d like to hear that too; especially if you have leads on where to get that information. I can provide the original OmniGraffle document if you want to make your own changes, but I’d have to clean it up a bit first; there are a few things that I just made invisible rather than deleting.
The vacuum pressure outside the station gave me the most trouble; I’d hoped it would be a simple equation, or a statistic NASA would publish on their general ISS fact pages, but mainly I just found statements that the pressure inside the LHC beam pipe was the same as at 1000km altitude. For ISS orbit I found values or equations around the place suggesting values that differed by a factor of a billion, and nothing that seemed convincingly more authoritative than the others. Finally, via the Wikipedia page on orders of magnitude of pressure, I found a NASA document with the numbers for 500km, so I used those. It actually varies by a factor of 20. This is still at least 70km higher than the station, so outside the station it’s more likely to be toward the higher end of that range; that is, a less perfect vacuum than inside the LHC beam pipe.
I also had some technical difficulties with the presentation (apart from the clutter and my lack of graphical talent or training.) Firstly, I’m sorry if colour-blind people have trouble distinguishing anything. I wanted to use a colour-blind safe palette, but the paler colours wouldn’t have had enough contrast with white to work with the style I’d chosen. The colours of the information boxes are not essential anyway; they just group them into broad categories and might make it a bit easier for people to find the corresponding information about the ISS or the LHC.
As for finding the corresponding information boxes about the ISS and LHC, it’s really not optimal. There’s a tangled mess of dashed lines connecting them which is really no more functional than background decoration. I thought of making each info box link to the corresponding one on the other diagram, but although that worked in OmniGraffle, in a pdf viewer it did not zoom in enough on the linked box to make it sufficiently obvious which one you’d just jumped to. I also would have liked to make the links in the notes clickable, and add images to some of them. Again, this was possible in OmniGraffle but not in pdf. I’m not sure if there’s a common format that allows all these things.
So, after all that, the important question: Which one would win in a fight?
Of course it depends what the fight is, and here’s where you can get creative. In a weight-loss competition such as The Biggest Loser, I think the ISS would win, having lost about an eighth of its weight by going up to 426km altitude. Though the LHC did lose a fair bit of helium at one point. Meanwhile, the ISS literally runs rings around the LHC, and would certainly win the high jump. If you have an idea, feel free to comment here or, as the TMIgraphic says, tweet it with the #ISSvsLHC hashtag. Maybe it’ll catch on.
As for the ultimate winner, I’ll let Wil Wheaton have the last word. Science. SCIENCE!
Update: I heard back from my friend who had information on the LHC tunnel temperature (actually the temperature of the LHCb cavern, but it should be about the same), and updated that. I also added information in the notes about the exhibition on the AMS detector which you can come see at CERN Microcosm at the moment, and nudged a few things inwards so the preview is a little narrower. If you’ve gone through all the notes in the old pdf you might already have seen this talk given at CERN by the astronauts who installed the AMS on the International Space Station. I was there, and I wanted to ask (for the purposes of this comparison) which they thought was the most awesome out of the LHC and the ISS, but I was in one of the few spots without a microphone.
One thing I’d been meaning to mention is that the path to ‘orbit’ of both things starts with a proton and continues with a booster. The first module of the ISS was put into orbit using a Proton rocket, and many of the rest were taken to orbit on the space shuttle, with its solid rocket boosters. In the LHC, it’s the particle called a proton and the Proton Synchrotron Booster which accelerates it as part of the journey to the LHC.
How to gain super powers by sneaking into a particle physics lab
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife, video on October 24, 2011
In the film Spider-Man 3, escaped convict Flint Marko jumps over a fence marked:
Danger
Particle Physics Test Facility
Keep Out
And ends up getting caught in a some kind of beam and becoming the Sandman, a being made out of sand who can change his shape at will. I watched it in the theatre with about a dozen people from CERN (all of them named Maikel), and one of them exclaimed, ‘Run to building 40, get a coffee!’
Unfortunately, you won’t turn into the Sandman by sneaking into CERN. But you might just turn into something like the Silver Surfer. Well, okay, maybe you wouldn’t travel faster than light, but you could levitate. I finally got to do so on their superconducting scooter at the Supra Show to celebrate 100 years of superconductivity a couple of weeks ago:
And you don’t even need to jump a fence! Just keep an eye on CERN’s homepage and MaNEP’s homepage, and sign up to the Globe’s mailing list to find out when there will be interesting talks and demonstrations for the general public. There are also a few other events coming up where it might make an appearance. I’ve seen the scooter at a couple of different events, and I don’t know how often they bring it out, but there are many other interesting talks and demonstrations.
There’s more information on how the superconducting scooter works in the video description. It’s essentially superdiamagnetism, as far as I know. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Superman, but hey, it’s real! Welcome to the future. Here’s a nice explanation which begins with a Superman reference. Incidentally, you don’t have to be a superconductor to levitate due to diamagnetism. Even frogs can levitate, but it’s not easy.
Of course, the other way you could become a superhero is by using Generic™ brand hair gel.
By the way, the song in that video is Liquid Nitrogen, by CERN’s other LHC, Les Horribles Cernettes. My other superpower is knowing a song about almost every topic. Today, somebody brought up Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that becoming an expert at something takes 10 000 hours of practice, so I decided to find out how much time I’ve spent listening to funny music. I wrote an AppleScript to sum up the time spent listening to the selected songs in iTunes, and selected all the songs in my Silly Songs playlist. Alas, I have only listened to it for 3026 hours, at least since April 2005 when I dropped my iPod and lost all that information. So if it turns out there’s something I don’t have a song about, it’s because I’m not an expert. I am an expert on all of my music, including the ‘normal’ stuff, though, with 11 242 hours.
Back to superheroes: Could somebody who understands more about the relationship of electric power to superconductivity please make a joke involving Spider-Man’s ‘with great power comes great responsibility’? As far as I can tell, with great power comes the same great power, circulating forever, but that’s not very funny. Just like immortality without immunity to pain isn’t very funny after the Sun burns out, when you’re just floating through space for eons on end, occasionally getting stuck inside a star or black hole until it goes supernova or evaporates.
Addendum: I finally wrote a short story about that last sentence.
Addendum 2: Someone I know only as arthurd006_5 suggests ‘with great power comes great coercivity‘ but isn’t sure whether that works electromagnetically. It does sound nice though, and outside of electromagnetism, great coercion seems to come with great power.
Comic: Control Systems Explained
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on September 25, 2011
I’ve been involved in control systems for various amazing things for the last six and a half years, and the other day I finally hit upon a way to explain what that is.
In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler.
Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few other things:
In reality, of course, it’s a little more complicated, the safety systems work, and I haven’t seen graph paper for far too long. This was just for fun. The big red button picture is a public domain image from wikipedia and the graph paper was from SciRep. All other art is by me, which is why it’s so terrible.
Stochastic induction of epizeuxis is my bird feeder made out of a coconut
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on February 13, 2011
The following video is not an example of creative output on my part, for by giving Secretary of Geek Affairs Wil Wheaton the CERN T-shirt featured, I simply did what clearly needed to be done. I am nonetheless pleased to have induced what I believe to be an example of my favourite word, ‘epizeuxis‘:
Here is a picture of the card that comes with the T-shirt, which has an explanation of the equation (click for the text of the card and a higher-resolution version of the photo):
I have written an ‘origin story’ in the style of Peter Sagal’s, explaining the improbable series of events that led to my being on a boat in a position to give Wil Wheaton a CERN T-shirt, and drawing a parallel between the above video and Peter Sagal‘s bird feeder made out of a coconut. However, it ended up somewhat long (1000 words) and show-offish, and I have been too busy watching concert videos to edit it properly (indeed, I arbitrarily stopped editing it when I noticed the word count was exactly 1000), so I’ll put it below the ‘more’ thingy for you to ignore. I’m not sure whether all of the events are in the right order, but the story is 1000 words long so it’s too late to edit them now. It looks like I’ll even have to include the superfluous second introduction, since I accidentally included that in the word count.
It’s a shame, really, because I promised somebody I’d include the word ‘shanty’, and now I can’t edit it in. But you can’t argue with integer powers of the number of digits most humans have on their hands.
E-cards of Yore
Posted by Angela Brett in Old Stuff, The Afterlife on December 16, 2010
While you’re sending electronic cards to hundreds of your barely-remembered ones with a single click this holiday season, spare a thought for your parents and grandparents, who had to walk a long way uphill (both ways) in the snow to post their e-cards. They were so lucky; I love walking in snow.
I recreated an e-card from the pre-internet age so that young whippersnappers of today could see what they’re missing out on:
Old-fashioned e-card
It’s so hard to find a good card punch these days, but people back then were resourceful, so I had to be too.
Swiss soldiers could even write e-cards to their loved ones from the front
I made this in 2007 from one of the punch cards I rescued when a man I shared my office with retired, but it only just occurred to me that it was sufficiently creative to put on my blog. I didn’t have a real blog in 2007, so it’s fair enough.
There were real Swiss stamps commemorating 50 years of CERN, but I didn’t happen to have any on the day that I decided to do this, so I printed a fake one. I wrote the card in ASCII according to this. If I did it wrong, it’s because I’m not old enough to remember those days. If you know better, please share your wisdom.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 
.png){kind=link}