CERN: when science involves a lot of waiting and routine maintenance work

-
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 troubleshoot. Frantic calls are made to-and-fro between the tunnels, the different experiments' control rooms and of course, from the LHC control room. The objective of achieving more physics tonight is not going to happen, without the beam. This could not be happening at the worst time than now, with a major bi-annual event about to happen in Paris in the fourth week of July, where data from the LHC, some months into its operation (and occasional shutdowns), were being reconstructed and analyzed for presentation at the ICHEP 2010. In fact, many meetings are taking place talking about that even as I am visiting right now. And it is disappointing that I could not really witness actual collisions and data flowing in during my shift shadowing. However, I certainly learnt a lot about how the different consoles are connected to each other, and to read the figures on the machines, even if they are full of acronyms and huge numbers.

One thing you'll soon learn about huge scientific communities is how they create their own little acronyms that became so plentiful that many of the regular users forget the full name of the thing the acronyms were referring to.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Queering physics - musing part I

-
It has been a busy past two months of constant writing, seminar presentation, travelling and finally, starting on a new summer job as a TA for a general physics course. A recent paper I submitted earlier this month on the topic of feminism, 'hard' science, feminist science fiction, and queerness, got me thinking about the notion of queerness in physics, and whether it is possible to think about queer physics. So far, none of the feminist epistemology of science essays I had read have quite pointed me towards that direction, so I need to think about this further. Nevertheless, my early postulate is that queer physics speaks about knowledge-making in physics that takes the form of subverting the hegemony of a dominant and mainstream discourse. It also interrogates the point of physics knowledge that have been marginalized or discarded, and query on what constitute the parameters of legitimacy governing their acceptance. It is possible that one can consider queer physics to on...
Read on >>

ArtScientist/ScienceArtist: Finding a Creative-Intellectual Room of One's Own

-
UPDATE Dec 21, 2016 There is an issue by Interdisciplinary Science Reviews dedicated to the delineation of the two cultures problem that non-academics and academics from poorly provisioned institutions will not be able to access. When I get to reading the issue, I will do a separate post on the debates in another blog post. This will be filed under the label of "artscience/scienceart" as part of all the projects that will fall under the rubric; I will post updates on the projects in this blog. UPDATE Dec 20, 2016 The post also appears here . ----------------------------- Here's another holiday read recommendation Sandy's Circus: A Story of Alexander Calder . I discovered this book when I visited a small exhibit of Calder's work at the Nasher Museum (part of Duke University) back in 2014.   -------------------------- Now that I am going from full-time vacation to half-time in the week leading up to Christmas, the start of the second week of vacation c...
Read on >>

Speculative Physics according to Friedrich WJ Schelling

-
These notes are my attempts at making sense of how the notion of speculation and physics are played out in 18th century Europe, through an actual attempt to address the concept in Schelling'S work that partially approximates the constructs of science today. More on how I intend to transfer what he does here to our understanding of modern quantum theory later, probably in the outline of my talk. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Introduction to the Outlines of a System of Natural Philosophy: or, On the Idea of Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of this Science Transcendental philosophy subordinates the Real to the Ideal, while Natural Philosophy explain the Ideal by the Real. Two sciences as one science Is also a critique of the dynamical system of Kant The possibilities of speculative physics lie in: 1. Having sufficient knowledge of an object's working principles. ...
Read on >>