Tag Archives: Lily

My three least favourite quarks

Posted on 17/05/2011 by

Also at The Guardian. Quarks are what dragged me into this mess. I’ve done about 50 hours work in the last 4 days and have run out of clean cutlery. My fridge contains only an empty tub of hummus and … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , ,

Having the Higgs in the room

Posted on 22/04/2011 by

Also at The Guardian It is a beautiful thing that Peter Higgs did. He took a very complicated description of reality that explained some things so well it could not be ignored, and utterly failed to explain other things, things … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Philosophy of Science, Physics, Science | Tagged ,

“He completely lost me on gravity”

Posted on 23/03/2011 by

At The Guardian. I got a typically hilarious email from my wonderful mother this morning. Tempted as I am to copy and pasted the email into this blog, it would ruin my retirement plan to publish a compendium of every … Continue reading →

Posted in Cosmology, Physics, Physics Stories, Science | Tagged ,

Boredom: symmetry, god and x-factor

Posted on 27/11/2010 by

Also at The Guardian. I gather that my last post wasn’t very popular- I emailed it to my mother and she emailed me back with a story about Benedict Cumberbatch (it was a good one) and thanks for the advent … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Philosophy of Science, Physics, Science | Tagged ,

Don’t wear your colours here..

Posted on 20/11/2010 by

I’ve spent the last 48 hours enthralled by the goings on at the Argonne “Analysis Jamboree”. I’m not really much of a one for these things… my more senior colleagues doze and my more junior colleagues tap loudly on their … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Science | Tagged , , ,

Doing it for the thrill

Posted on 15/10/2010 by

This week I have been trying in vain to garner an interest in frequentist confidence levels. To be honest, I’m doing it (high energy physics) for the thrill. We just got two picobarns of data in a day, which has … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Rambling, Science | Tagged , , ,

Intellectual poverty

Posted on 06/10/2010 by

There’s a lot of kerfuffle at the moment about the “brain drain” – UK scientists leaving for America or Europe because they can’t get a job in the UK any more. This is undoubtedly a real effect, but perhaps doesn’t seem that relevant to the average UK tax payer. Or MP. Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Politics, Science Policy | Tagged , , ,

Health and Safety in Particle Physics II

Posted on 29/09/2010 by

After Lily’s post on poor risk assessment in particle physics, I thought I should bring to your attention the risk of putting your hand in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – as discussed by Ed Copeland and his colleagues at … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Science | Tagged , , ,

Black holes and falling objects

Posted on 29/09/2010 by

I was driving into Argonne with a colleague yesterday morning and he was telling me about the experiment (E687) that he worked on when he was a graduate student. It caught fire and burnt down. The reason for the fire … Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Physics Stories, Science | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Grid

Posted on 17/09/2010 by

I have recently been ‘submitting to The Grid’. This is not some kind of freaky S&M thing, disappointingly perhaps to some. It is a process we have to go through in order to analyze the data being collected by the ATLAS detector at CERN. Continue reading →

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , ,