Clarissa AL Lee's Lateral Worlds

I know I haven't had time to write up on my last few days at CERN, despite the interviews I've conducted and discussions with two eminent theoretical physicists (one of whom was a colleague of Richard Feynman, John Ellis). But I will try to get to it soon once I am done with my sojourn to the the library at the American Center of Physics, College Park. As I am now reading through the files on the profiles of the eminent physicists documented by Thomas Kuhn and Co for their History of QM project, and looking at where they've published and also the contents of their publication, I am reminded by what Michelangelo Mangano said when he spoke of physics being an elite profession in the early part of the twentieth century, and how much more famous a large percentage of the physicists were compared to today, I am also reminded of how much easier it is to publish in famous journals such as Science, Nature and also the Philosophical Magazine (which is a journal dedicated to the na...

I know I haven't written about the last few days about my work, and I hope to remedy that soon. So far, too many things to catch up on and I'm exhausted post international travel. But I'll like to paste the page to this interesting site that will keep you informed of some of the most important parameters experimentalists at the LHC are looking up for and how much weight they place on these factors in helping them in elucidating an experimental breakthrough that will either explain or disproved existing theories of particle and nuclear physics  Refresh this link for constant updates, though some updates may not come for hours. The increasing luminosity is good news for the physicist, for they place much weight on its ontological importance for good and high quality collisions. Now I have to go back to preparing for tomorrow's visit to the Niels Bohr Library and Archive. I haven't had time to go see much of the sights yet, being tired as I am now. Might just slee...

Which of course, is less exciting for the particle physicists and also the public at large. Today, the PS (Proton Synchrotron) Booster had a bit of a problem, so they had to trace the entire diameter of it in the tunner to find out what's causing the 'beam leak' during the injection process. While I managed to learn more about how luminosity can be increased by improving the capability of multibunching (which means to enable multiple bunches (a bunch will consists of a few million of packets of protons) to be transfered at the same time. Of course, a lot of delicate maneuverings of the machine would be involved here, even as injection studies are done, as they have to make sure that they know exactly how the beam is moving about through the dipole magnets at all times. However, due to some problems at the Booster (and also some other problems at another sector), they had to ramp down the magnets and shut off the beam just so that the engineers can go down into the tunner to...

THere are tonnes I can say about what I've learnt today after the visit to the LHCb and ALICE control rooms, and also in conversations with the students. At the same time, I am spending more time digging into the publications produced by CERN to fill in all the gaps and clarify further much of the knowledge I've gained by seeing physics in practice. After all, as a shift leader at the LHCb control room told me, it is the work of the data analysts, data quality checkers and those who are involved in the reconstruction of raw data from the detectors that are under-highlighted (though by no means ignored, as many historians of science have tell the stories of human computers, usually women, who were set the task of painstakingly identifying, cross-checking, analysing and cataloguing the many extra-terrestrial objects that they were able to detect with their astrophysical apparatuses) in the sociology of physics (perhaps that is true in some of the older works, which I am still in ...

CERN has a smaller and often less visible group of theoretical physicists who hand around the same building as the library. They tend to have less students and they move between experimental groups in pursuit of the goals of fulfilling certain predictions that were perhaps made mathematically 30 years or more ago. They are perhaps more reticent than most when it comes to highlighting new discoveries, but I will find out more later this week when I get to spend time with some theoreticians (or at least one of them). I was just looking at the paper that predicted the existence of Higgs in weak and electromagnetic interactions in the Glashow-Salam-Weinberg model written back in the 1977. Energy levels prediced in its production Higgs decay seem to be going on at an energy level way lower than that operating at the LHC at the moment. It will be interesting to try to decipher the differences between the models and realities, and to finesse these differences. Depending on whom you speak t...

Sure, I managed to meet with the current spokesperson of the LHCb (b stands for the beauty/bottom quark, which is one of the two third generation quark, the other being 'top,' that are beloved of the HE physicists) experiement. Today is also when I get the clarification of how physicists would define the term 'phenomenology,' which is the effort to correlate data with existing theoretical models, and to try to find a meeting point between both. Today, I heard of the Penguin diagram in the sketching of the CP violation in quarkonia. I was informed of this of course by the spokesperson but someone has blogged about this way ahead of me. In fact, the penguin image came from that blog. Now, in my own work, am I able to sublimate all the images I can and will get from CERN (and other national laboratories) to develop a new ontological perspective? Beyond that, I managed to dig up some papers by the theoretical physicists affiliated with CERN, and read the paper ...

Yesterday was moving day for me, so I got to work later than usual. However, I was able to catch the same amount of part 2 of the heavy ions lecture and also met with a CMS experimental physicist to get a better understanding of how 'quality' data is being hierarchically determined across different groups and the thousands of people entasked with selecting and optimizing usable data. I will not go into details here at this point, as he drew the diagrams for me in my notebook. However, if I can get a more comprehensive diagram somewhere, I'll have that posted here. Needless to say, it takes many layers of data shifting in a experiment such as the CMS before we even reach the layer where the muon particle group come in. The system is so complex that each little section is handled by a group of people, and by the time the synchronization takes place between directors of these different groups, very intensive analysis work would already have been done by hundreds of brainpower ...

Today is the first day of the summer student lecture series and I was about 20 minutes late, no thanks to getting out late and then getting a little lost on my way over (though less loss than when I first biked home). The lecture was on heavy ion collisions and is the first of a tripartite series. For those back home interested in following these lectures, which are at a level that undergraduate students can understand, you can look it up here and use this page to access the previous year lectures. Lectures that have not passed will not be in display, but the ones that are over, you will sometimes get either the video or the pdf versions of the slides shown. Tomorrow onwards will be a continuation, though I am likely to attend selectively since I have my own work cut out for me. Today, went to the CERN library and got out their annual reports. They are worth a study for anyone interested in understanding the sociology and historical developments of big science, as well as all the fi...

Today I got up a bit later than the day before, being overtired from getting lost when biking and from a long day with interrupted sleep (plus jetlag). After morning breakfast and some reading, I took a very long walk (about 45 min) to the nearest bus stop to take me to CERN (I chose not to bike today since I was to be going off somewhere else at the end of the day and would want to have my bike available at my hotel for Wed). I got myself a sim card and had some books shipped back to the States to lighten the load I am carrying (those two books weigh at least 6-7 kg, I would say) since I have little use for them here and also so that I could bring back some other stuff. Then , I continued with my appointment making and preparation for two meetings. My first meeting was with the outreach coordinator of ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). Since I could get most of the usual description of ALICE from the internet and the numerous publications they’ve put out, I used this chance...

In my other blog, I will be writing about my first impression upon arriving in the little township of St Genis-Pouilly. I would have written yesterday except that I was feeling out of sorts and trying to orientate my way around via the Internet. But here, I'll say a little about how it was like to be at CERN for the first day and the first time of my life Today is both eventful and non-eventful. Eventful in the non-intellectual sense but as I spent the whole day on administrative and general matters (including getting lost around the rather haphazhardly numbered buildings, even though that got a little easier in time as in I get a little less 'lost'). I took a taxi from my hotel in St-Genis Pouilly which is near the French site but too far away from the Swiss end of things which is where I have to be if I am entering there for the first time. I was planning to take the bus but the thought of carrying a heavy bag and walking for 20 minutes to get to the bus stop (in the ve...