Watching the stars at night

"I've got a fantastic idea!" She said.
"What would that be?" we said.
"We should go watch the Perseids at their peak!"
"Sounds like an awesome idea, could get a picnic or something and sit in a field." We thought.
"Well, actually I was thinking of somewhere more exotic..."
"On a building? Different town? What?"
"Well the Jura are only half an hours bus ride away..."
"And 1700 metres straight up..."
"There wouldn't be any cloud or light pollution. And we could say we'd spent a night on a mountain."
"Where it's cold, dark and we might get eaten by hungry cows?"
"Yeah!"
"So... when's the peak?"

Slightly paraphrased this maybe, but that's essentially the planning that went into one of the most awesome things ever devised by mankind, or climbing a mountain for the night for short. Just to cut short any hopes of enthusiasm of fantastic pictures of this night, almost everyone going up the hill forgot their cameras, to a man. Yeah, we were well prepared that night. Apart from man with the awesome camera that took some photoes of the sunrise. But alas, the plan was simple; turn up at a bus stop at 6pm, get bus to base of mountain, climb like mothers to get to the top before it got dark, seal selfs in sleeping bags and blankets to avoid freezing to death. Stages 1 and 2 completed without a problem. Stage 3 took a mild amount of time and the correct use of lots of swearing. For the uninitiated, hiking up a mountain 101 the rushed version.

3.1) Put on sensible shoes for walking long distances. Sandels are not acceptable. Walking boots are good. Barefoot fine, although don't expect any feet left at the end.

3.2) Point self in direction of path.

3.3) Follow said path until you start going downhill.

At this point you are at the top of the mountain. This is all well and good, unless you don't follow 3.2. We were provided with the directions of "Follow this path by a farm until you get to the top." When we came across our first 3 pronged fork with all routes going to the top, secret pacts of murder and ritual sacrifice began to be made (to be fair, these instructions were given by a guy with hair longer than mine and that one night went swimming wearing a toga. I rest my case.), and we started aggressively exploring the natural surroundings, i.e. getting lost.

Several badly chosen routes and about an hour later, we found a car park (Yay!) and some other climbers (double yay!) and some signposts (triple yay and a swig of rum!) which all kindly pointed us in the right direction to get up the bloody mountain. Turns out you can drive 3/4 of the way up it. Hiking, now even for the permenantly lazy. But alas, the rest of the walk up was thoroughly uneventful with clearly signed paths everywhere. Then we found a nice area of greenary, with a convenient copse of trees to block our the wind and keep us sheltered. Perfect we say, perfect!

Until about 12.30pm. For the uninitiated, the higher up you get, the colder it gets. Quite substantially colder actually, especially at night. Back to that lack of preparation; so at an early hour we realise just quite how fucking freezing it gets! You'd think 4 layers would suffice, but the world is insistent on proving us very, very wrong. But the French, the somewhat surprisingly prepared folk they are plan for this kind of stuff. The walkers amongst you will know about the tradition of mountain huts around the world. By crook or by hook, we'd managed to bunker down about 200metres from one. What's that convenience, you've given us a silver platter? Why yes, we will take it with excessive abandon. With a small smattering of French from our resident francophones (from Quebec and Sweden nonetheless) we managed to get the guys left in there to let us crash in the sleeping area, and they even gave us some cheese and wine!

A brief aside about these awesome people. They were an office-full of people from Geneva up here having a party. On a Wednesday night. On a mountain. And as a one up, after having quaffed 2/3 bottles of wine between about 8 of them, they were going to climb back down the mountain. At 1am. And people call me crazy... But they gave us cheese (Roqueforte if I remember correctly) so we can't complain.

But back to the point, hut, roof, walls, stove, cups, water, kettle, tea bags(!). You could call it stereotypically British, but there's nothing quite like sitting at a mile up, with a clear sky, watching a meteor shower whilst drinking tea (Yorkshire blend if you're interested). And what a meteor shower, peak rate of 2 per minute, running from SW to NE right across the Jura. A small part of me might have gone to the warm fuzzy place permenantly along with the giant bunny rabbits. About an hour and a half later, a lack of body temperature forced a retreat in doors and quick attempt at sleep.

You'd think that'd be enough awesome for one day, but of no. As mentioned, the mountains sit NW from Lake Geneva. That'd mean that the sun rose right over lake Geneva. I'll simply say, its a sight to behold, especilly with Mount Blanc just visible in the distance.

For a nice end to the saga, we decided to see how fast we could get down the mountain. Apparently you could run. We tried it. A couple of barbed wire fences and a an angry cow later, we found that it could be done in 30 minutes. Given it took 3 hours to get up(!), I'd call it a step in the right direction. One bus ride later and I was back in the office, only 15 minutes late. Passing out on the desk at 3pm suggested discretion was the better part of valour, and to bed it was.

Proof positive that entertainment can be cheap, and cold.

Wandering the darkened tunnels

For those that don't know, CERN is huge. I don't mean building huge, but HUGE. Think large town huge. On a good day there are some 20,000 people there. Well, I say people, 20,000 physicists, so a close approximation. As with all large places with people, you have to have the essentials of modern life; electricity, water, heating and network connections. This means tunnels to connect them... many many tunnels. Let me reiterate just quite how many tunnels there are here; alongside the 27km of the LHC tunnel, there are the tunnels for the SPS, PS and PSB accelerators, connective tunnels to every goddamn building in the Meyrin site, and a couple of random ones to old building sites. There're miles of them, and best of all, you can walk through most of them.

Now, students being students everywhere in the world decided to have fun with this and hide something in the tunnels one year. And then decided to tell the sucessive years about it. Taking a wild guess, this caused masses of us young whipper snappers to rummage around dark, wet (torrential rain has to go somewhere. Did I mention these tunnels house part of the drainage system too?) and none to fine smelling places to try and find a bottle of beer. A couple of bashed heads later, we found something. A scrap of paper (barely) stuffed in a plastic wallet. With a riddle, as always. Scribed on it with vaguely the following:

"Down the darkened winding passage, Beneath the humming ring,

Under the electric guard, The Holy Grail lies."

"Yay!" we could all think, "Another trek through the dark." So of course off we went hunting for... something, somewhere. We went down a dark winding passage (although of them are dark and winding...), went beneath a humming ring (you don't know stupidity until you see a sign pointing to a particle accelerator, a "Danger Radiation!" sign and then start wondering if you have to go past it), and found something electric (electrical supplies to the SPS, underground and with a tiny key lock to guard it) and..... no bottle of beer! Yeah, good times guys, good times. We managed to dig our way out of the tunnel, finding a not so suitably contained ladder.

Obviously some bastard had stolen our beer! But we'll come back to that. Now you might notice something from this tale, no mention of security. That would be because there was none. That's right folks, you can walk right next to some of the biggest pieces of machinery on the planet without having to pass security apart from the front gate! This would be one of the awesome things about CERN. Once you get past the front door with an ID (proof that you're smart enough I suppose), you can get just about anywhere that isn't an office. Want to see an ion source and the attached LINAC? Sure, just through that door. Climb to the top of water cooling tower? Sure, just 20m of stairs to ascend. Quite an amount of trust to put in a group of 250 students that regularly got trolleyed. Their assumption that we wouldn't break anything was astounding, and look what it got them ;).

Back to the tunnels. They contained many things, including a wonderful variety of shortcuts. If you knew the right path it was possible to jump out of people that thought they'd just passed you. This extending to security guards too until they started voicing their displeasure. Best of all was that there were entrances everywhere. If you knew where to look. Small bunkers by the road? All contain an entrance. Those little drainage covers? Entrances. Flights of stairs going in a building below the ground floor? Entrances. Best of all was the entrance right next to the main entrance. Walk down it, then run like a bugger to another exit, and then walk back towards the entrance with everyone very confused.

But anyway, that wonderful bottle of beer? Did we find it? Yes! On my final night there, on one final venture through the rambling tunnels with a couple of chums we found the goddamn thing! Wet (filled with run off from a thunderstorm, lovely), with a glass and completely drunk. Kind of a downer for the end, but eh, can't win 'em all.

I'm back, and I have a plan

Kind of. Right, I meant to use this as a diary of my times at CERN, but that failed spectacularly. I then subsequently meant to use it to keep tabs on my Master's project, which again went down in abject failure. So, I'm going to make one more attempt at using this thing for... something.

So, if I get around to it I'll have stuff from the summer (a couple of dumb projects and a trip to Scandanavia), and a diary of my PhD. And in the mean time, some old stories of the things this was originally meant to be about. But first I need to remember the bleedin' stuff.

Bananarama folks, bananarama.

Why this hasn't seen anything recently

Simple, because doing things is so much more fun than talking about doing things. Sorry netterwebs, you lose once again. More news will follow when I get back to civilisation and talk to some of you ready buggers. Then the fun will continue. I bring tales of moresome awesome!

Starting Phase 2 Commander...

And so I enter phase 2 of working, the imperious slog! More accurately, I'm now actually expected to know what I'm doing. This has issues. Most obvious being the not really knowing what I'm doing, but that doesn't seem to bother people. They have enough confidence to be getting me to write a control programme for linac4 and to trust my calculations. This worries me greatly.

To sum it up, I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to make magnetic field maps, as I've mentioned previously. A little bit tedious, but quite interesting nonetheless. After a meeting today, I've been asked to model the fields in three dimensions, and including several other magnets. I'm starting to think they want to go into computer gaming considering all this modelling stuff I'm doing. That would probably be less of a headache, Newtonian physics is simple (relatively anyway). This will be more of the same I think.

Second task. Linac4 needs something to allow the different parameters in it to be controlled. This involves making the controlling algorithms, making some sort of GUI, figuring out how to connect this to a big arse piece of equipment, and hopefully not blowing up several millions pounds and a couple of years of planning worth of work. Erm... woo?! Seriously, its a surprising amount of fun considering how difficult it should be, but luckily for me scientists are less organised than the business world, so this is fairly laid back. Huzzah for research.

Soon to come, something resembling what Switzerland is like and teh pictorz! Also, Hugo's top ten things he likes about Europe, and ten things he doesn't like (take a guess which was easier to make).


And a little leaver, and mighty fine quote by a physicist:

"Only the one who dare can win" - W. Pauli 1930. So awesome even the SAS honoured him.

We're still here, giving ground control back to Major Tom

Good day my good gentlemen and lafy folk. I return from the darkened depths of neverwhere to update once more. Hopefully twice more. We considers it sensible to have a post of science, and a post of the craziness of Geneva. Thus we start with the awesome science, obviously.

Firstly, let it be said that working on an actual physical problem as opposed to the problems you get in university courses are two rather different kettles of fish. I'v been modelling particle motion through magnetic fields in the past couple of weeks, and basic electrodynamics is what I've been using nearly exclusively. None of this quantum mechanics or high level stuff, but just classical mechanics. It probably helps that I'm only working on beam dynamics presently (think optics but with fast moving particles as opposed to light). That said, its a bit of a surprise to be relying on relatively simple things to understand the problem at hand.

Second off. Working in a lab environment is interesting, very interesting. Its possible to go a number of days without seeing anyone, and then be flooded with questions, meetings and answers in one day. Take this week for example. Everyday but Thursday was largely devoid of contact with others in my department. Come Thursday, I had to go to lectures, give a presentation, and then was introduced to the rest of the section (Accelerators and Beams, Accelerator and Beam Physics, Hadron Sources and LINACs if you're interested). All very busy.

The fruitful labours of the last couple of weeks has been the following. A couple of lines. That's it, a couple of lines. However, as I've been informed, those couple of lines tell my section whether what they're going to build is going to be irradiated in the wrong place or not, and so makes me feel all important. A little more detail:

• Spend 3 days trying to comprehend how to use PATH manager, an inhouse particle modelling package, for which the user's guide are the current maintainers of the software across the corridor. A very useful tool, but potentially flawed in its inability to model particles travelling backwards compared to the reference beam...


• Spend another 2 days making basic field maps of two sets of permenent bar magnets. This sounds surprisingly simple, but the input format was very touchy, and finding the correct dimensions from schematics written in a language you don't understand is a trifle challenging.


• Spend a day learning to use SuperFish, a magnetic field modeller based on materials and magnet input data. Again, getting used to the input format and using basic electrodynamics.


• Spend 2 days making an accurate field map (all materials and bits considered), analyse particle data, and give a presentation on this to a room of brains (my supervisor, his boss and other Postdocs. Not at all nerve racking. Was quite thrilling though).

A minor level of insight I hope, and not too confusing.

The Portal is Active Commander...

Welledy welledy welledy ladies, gents and any amorphous blobs which maybe reading this on their atrophied hands (we know who you are *GLARES*).

Now has two days of work-fest under me belt. And yes, its as awesome as was promised apart from one tiny problem. It would appear that the things required for me to start what I need to do haven't quite arrived yet. Well poop.

But fear not, Danger Supervisor* is here to save the day! I has problem to solve. Said problem involves them not having done a calculation which would be useful. Danger student** has a purpose and a plan. But danger student has a slight hitch. Danger student doesn't know a flippin' thing about linear accelerators, ion sources, beam focusing (think light but lenses just don't cut it, atleast not glass one, magnetic on the other hand...) and beam dynamics. Now we're getting somewhere. Commence 2 day read-a-thon, with something resembling 400 pages of the finest literature the Accelerators, beams and plasma physics world can bring together.

Danger Student now things he might have something resembling a chance at doing this shiznit. Soon to come, Danger Student's photoes, starring:
Himself
His Room
His Office (Oooh shiney you say...)
His New Office (the other was alas so shiney some other blighter piked it)
His Supervisor, otherwise known as Kargoth

Then there was food, and it was good, very very good. Om nom nom!

*Seriously, he's awesome, he showed me particle accelerators without batting an eyelid
**Note - May not infact contain any danger. Unless poked ala beehive.

P.S. I think I found a /b/tard. God help us all.