On doing the science...

"Stand back, I'm going to do SCIENCE!" Those immortal words, uttered for the first time (I think) by the Randall Munroe of XKCD fame, admittedly on a t-shirt, but beggars can't be choosers eh? Now it always conjures up stirring images of men in white coats stood infront a big button, with SCIENCE written on it. A bit like this one, but less foreboding. Or of folk with lasers, shining it and being in awe. Or of staring at the experiment and saying, "By Scott! We've got it!" Now let me introduce to you the real world of science.

Step one; as a scientist, let me introduce you to your new best friend and eternal compatriot (or if you're really lucky/unlucky (delete as appropriate to your tastes) one of these). If you're extra special (like me!) you'll be spending a lot of time getting intricately familiar with both of them. And not in a sexy way. You will do just about everything on this machine. Writing, calculating, analysing, simulating, programming, building, hitting, ranting, plotting the downfall of your lab, conniving, writing a short novel (known as a theses in some circles), and probably, ultimately sharpening into a crude tool with which to return to a simpler life. Ok, the last one not so much, but it always helps to be prepared. It is literally your life blood, and you'd bloody well best take care of it.

Step two; 90% of your time WILL be spent doing data analysis. Be it writing code to analyse the data, looking at data, copying data, plotting data, backing up the data, more copying the data, plotting the data in a slightly different way, fitting functions to data, being a tomato with the data, making hot sweet love to the data, burning the data for disagreeing with theory. Its a simple fact of scientific life, data is quick to produce, slow to analyse. Today is the day of First Collisions at 7TeV (more on that later). the data just produced today will probably take about a week to analyse. No multiply that by 20 years of running. That's a lot of data. Hell, the LHC's yearly output is somewhere in the region of several petabytes. And that's just the useful data. It throws away over 99% of the data on the grounds that we know about it already! And even better, as a PhD student (like me), you'll be given most of it, because, well, your supervisor probably doesn't want to do it either, and he's been here longer than you.

Step three; Be prepared to bang your head against the wall. A lot. Science is not easy, nor simple. If it was, every bugger in the world would be discovering something new every day. Its why there are specifically scientists out here doing it. Just like there's doctors, electiricians, engineers etc. The major difference being that for the most part they know every step of their job, as they've done it several thousand times before. By its nature, what you're doing in science most likely has never been done before. Its hard, its annoying, you will probably lie awake at night thinking about it. But...

Step four; Everything is related. I mean everything. Science, being a wonderful little thing, is described quite annoyingly well by mathematics. So, being good at maths helps. Fortunately, mathematicians write lots of paper on mathematical gymnastics, which work for science! So do other scientists. And they cross-breed, and produce useful things. Like Green's functions. I love these beauties. I first studied them whilst doing a course on gravitational waves and general relativity. I'm now using them to study electromagnetic waves in particle accelerators. How awesome is that?! Some lovely man (that long ago in inevitably was. More women scientists, now!) came up with a new way of solving mathematical equations, and suddenly millions of people's lives were made indescribably easier. If he was still alive, I'd buy him a pint. Likewise, I use circuit theory to describe my big old accelerating cavities. I could either solve Maxwell's equations by brute force or... I could use a circuit model of LCR circuits and out pops some normal modes. I think I just had a braingasm!

Step five; And finally, the best bit. The experiments. But... they aren't that simple. You must design it. Test it. Make sure it won't blow up. Check you can afford it. Try and find whether the equipment exists yet (you'd be surprised how frequently this one occurs). And then... design something that uses it, and hope to hell you didn't get it wrong. And it will go wrong. Maybe in a small way (spectrometer wavelength register is a couple of nm out of tune), maybe a big way (A big big way), but something will probably go wrong. And you'll adapt to it. Solve it. Because its what you're there for. And because you're awesome, of course. You really do have to try this for yourself to understand just how awesome doing experiments is (this includes building circuits at home and what not kiddies)

Step six; You do it all over again. Because it you can't do it twice, you're doing it wrong. Everything can be done again, if its actually real ;).

Step seven; You talk about it. Because everything you do is worth talking about (at least you think it is, possibly more on this later) everyone has to hear about it. Conferences, papers, meetings, casual discussions in the pub. You'll brag, bleet and generally be huffing proud of yourself for doing some bloody science! And rightly too. But seriously, I spend about 10 hours a week in meetings. You really do talk quite a lot. Often about boobs and beer. And science. And all three (dirty, I know).

So there you go, a quick and dirty guide to doing science, minus all the horrendous maths and code that normally goes in between

On the nature of transience

Firstly... welcome to the third attempt at making this blog actually something I update frequently! After failing epicly last time, I thought I'd stop making fuck tons of potential topics and then forgetting them, and basically just stick to once a week, because that's at least compatible with my laziness.

Right, for the introduction. I'm one Hugo Day. A PhD student nominally associated with the University of Manchester/Cockcroft Institute in the UK, but in reality working at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border. I started as a student in October 2009, Coming to CERN for about 3 weeks in November 2009, and am working here full time as of 8th February 2010. I work on the area of accelerator physics, the specifics of which I will probably go into at some point in the future. This is about the only important stuff there is to know. Well that and I only really speak English with a decent level of proficiency. This will probably be the source of many lulz/fails in the future.

This is my place to... well write whatever the hell I like really. We'll see what happens otherwise. If you want some of the actions of my past times at CERN, read below. More might appear with time. Angry monkeys!

So, what to lead on this little rebirth? I thought of doing the science, but I need some photos for that first. Then I thought of Geneva, but I'll come to that later. Then I thought of one of the more unknown parts of being here... the transient population. People coming and people fro-ing all the time.

CERN is a funny place. There are always people coming and going. Literally, it operates 24 hours a day, across 2 countries, operating some 40km of particle accelerator and probably over 100,000 tons of experimental equipment. As you'd expect, this produces quite a lot of need of people power. The thing is, a lot of this people power doesn't live and work at CERN normally. If you want a rough guess, maybe 10,000 people work at/with CERN. That's a lot of scientists. And engineers. And technicians. And admin staff. And librarians. And cafeteria staff. This is a BIG place. But, of those 10,000, I'd guess 4,000 are here on long term attachment (i.e. here for more than 3 months at a time). That's a full 60% of the working staff here that are in some kind of weird limbo between being here and not. Constantly.

That's 6,000 people. That's more than the population of most of the nearby towns! Just coming and going often on a weekly basis. As you can imagine, you meet a lot of people that are here for just a week or so. Take the last month for instance. Several weeks ago we had ATLAS week, where a large portion of the ATLAS collaboration (somewhere around 5-600 people I'd guess) came to CERN for a week. Then went home again. Last week was LHCb week, where again several hundred people came to CERN for only a week. As bizarre as it may sound, I ate dinner with about 3 different groups of people that week, quite aware that I wouldn't see many of them again for about 4 months, and never having met them before.

This seems to have two different effects on interactions here. Firstly, you become a hell of a lot more open about, well, everything. People are here for a week, so things happen with a reckless abandon. Want to travel into Geneva an hour from home for a meal? Done! Go climbing in the mountains on a days notice? Done and double done. Everything is more hectic, more lively, more impulsive. And the shorter the time you spend here, the more it seems to make you willing to try anything that's thrown your way.

In another way it also makes you quite closed off. Nationalities tend to clump together, sections meet each other for drinks. That small island of identity, be it through language, culture, work, make it very easy for groups to come together for short bursts and then disperse as its members again fly off over the world to wherever. This means that generally its very easy to find lots of people somewhat similar to you, but can be a right bastard to meet people outside of what might be your normal social circle. This of course being solved often by just sitting next to people and starting to talk to then.

Similarly to this, there is a very strange sense of superficialness to the whole proceedings. You can be sat next to someone for 2 hours, talking about their bitter worries and highest hopes. And then the next day you meet for coffee and have nothing better than a nod and a curt glance to give for your troubles. You are friendly to everyone because it you aren't... well you could be stuck, isolated in a place if thousands. And through what seems to be some ingrained isolation at CERN (seriously, ask how many people at CERN associated with people that don't work there. You'll find very few), if you can't socialise with the CERNois... your social life is deader faster than a fish on land.

That said, its still interesting. Most of the people here have been in the business for at least 10 years. Have lived in a couple of countries. And bizarrely above all, probably know every other bugger in their area of research. Work in vacuum systems? I bet your boss knows Bob from Fermilab that built the Tevatron's vacuum pump. Wakefields? Everyone knows Alexej Grudiev or Mr. Spataro. Its lively, vibrant and a bit mad. And damn its fun.