You open a box

And inside are more fucking boxes! Imagine this, recursively you open a box and find more boxes. But each box is interesting, so of course you can find more interesting things inside the box. And more so, until you find an infinite number of boxes in an infinitely large box. A box so large that it would eat the universe in its great gaping maw. Omnomnomnom.

Right some one mild distraction aside, here's to a little insight into why I's does science. I've done the how, so why not the will. This will of course be narrated by a very silly story and possibly will involve Godzilla at some point.

So, picture you're walking along a footpath in the boonies one day when you come across a most curious of objects. Its a small rock like object, shaped in a peculiar manner that is rather out of whack with the surrounding objects. Pondering what it is, you decide to pick it up and investigate the matter further. Some days later, after you've battled your way through a flock of flying bears (a much maligned species), you find that this strange rock resembles the bones commonly found in lizards. Amazed you wonder how this bone got to where it was. Some epic data trawling later and you've found that lizards do not exist in the area any more. However, once in the great gasps of time there were lizards there. This opens two questions; how did the lizard bone survive all this time, and what kind of lizard did it belong to. This is already chemistry, geology and biology in one step. And them of course, being odd people we decide that the first is the most interesting question.

So of course, you read up on fossilisation, taking in the great depths of mineral deposition, geological strata and probably a good bit of physical geography to learn about land movement and what not. But in this great melange, you also find out that there are other examples of this kind of bone lying around. So you obsessively collect them over the next few weeks, becoming some sort of finger kleptomaniac, probably driving some of you friends/acquaintances mad with bemusement. Religiously examining these little things you find out that there are different compositions of elements in them. Carbon, various minerals... exciting stuff! But them it strikes you, should not they have the same elements in them, being the same thing? So why does this little bony thing have slightly more C-14 than this other one? Then you think, and whilst enjoying some liquid sustenance, enough to create a supersaturated area of booze haze, you notice little tracks. From you tiny bone things. By god... particles from the lizards bones! But wait, this means stuff comes from it! So maybe the particles there can change! Egads... that would explain the different compositions!

Excited by this you get a bit overexcited and count the number of trails. But them you notice that different rocks have different quantities of trails. Oh no! More questions! But looking at your great list of components of each rock you notice that those with more of some material (C-14 for arguments sake) give out more trails. So maybe they're related. So you note this, and after 10 years of laboriously cataloguing this information, you notice that the rates have decreased, in some vaguely logarithmic fashion. Astounded you wonder if you could relate the time to the rate of decay. And what do you know, you can! And so you find you can figure out the age of these little rocks. But then there is something else... something wonderful. During this time, some crazy man in Germany has written to you about your particles from other particles theory of emission. Just as obsessed as you (but in the wrong subject, silly man), he's looked at particles with his ridiculously huge microscope and seen things being emitted. Even better, he's seen that these particles do funny things to living tissue in high enough doses.

So seeing this and being interested, you put you favourite parrot in a path of these beams. Three subsequent destructions of Tokyo later you've realised that some times curiousity has unintended consequences. But hell, it was going to happen sooner or later so you may as well have been the first. But at least now the world fears you from your mountain-top lair!

So, this excessively silly recount of the scientific thought process over, the basic idea is... ask questions. If you're ever unsure, curious, obnoxious or just want to be an annoying bastard, ask a bloody question. If you can't get an answer from someone else, then look for one. Blow up small islands, dig through ditches, shoot particles into trees, get information to convince yourself and others that you have an answer! If you do get an answer from someone else, ask them whether they're sure its right. Why? How? Got evidence? Can it be done better? Do you fornicating with gorillas? Well maybe not that one, but you get the gist.

So... go ask you gribbly monkey!

P.S. Just to note, anyone that subsequently uses the response "You can't prove me wrong!" to any question can, and should be punched repeatedly in the balls/ovaries until they cry. As should anyone that tries to use logic as an argument against evidence. What the universe shows is generally the actual truth. That it doesn't comply to your seemingly elegant logic/description is your own damn fault. Stop whining and come up with a better one you lazy twunt.

The pitter patter of tiny feet

And overwhelmed PC fans. That mechanical grinding noise pitches itself into your brain, slowly but surely mining away at your will to continue. You lurk around a corner... blackness. Nothing but the incessant grind, grind, grind of plastic on plastic. Sputter sputter, crunk... kaboom. That's vaguely the sound a computer makes when one tries to run a memory intensive EM simulation on it. Or more correctly when I run one. That's right, trying to simulate a particle beam (represented by the awesomeness of a wire carrying an electrical pulse. Oh yeah!) running through a small aperture in a ferrite magnet is capable of bringing 8GB of RAM-my goodness to its knees.

And thus rears the ugly head of doing science computationally. Sometime, somewhere you will want to simulate something. Nay, need to simulate something big. And as big and as fast as your machine might be, you'll run out of RAM. For those lucky enough to be able to push data to the Grid this isn't normally an issue. But for us poor plebs that can't use parralelised code the RAM hungry monster rears its head with astounding frequency. Take my present machine for instance. Core 2 Duo. 8GB RAM... by any sensible standards this should own anything that's thrown at it. But this is CERN. We do not do sensible. So... give said beasty 7 million mesh cells and tell it to carry out a FEM EM algorithm. And then watch it cry. Current usage... 2.5GB of RAM. And this is with a simple conductor. Lob in some lossy materials and watch it implode.

The solution? You get a supercomputer or big arse cluster. I live for the day.

One day when the world sleeps...

The clicker-clacker of keyboards shall reverberate in these hallowed halls of learning.

So, picture this, it's Saturday night. It's fairly warm outside. The world is abuzz with news and new things for us all to explore. One could cross from country to country seeing new things. And what am I doing at 12.30 on Sunday morning? Writing a progress report for my home institute (I've started taking up the European habit of calling them institutes, I feel it represents reality more closely). Such is the high flying life of physics graduate student. But given I barbecued half a cow last night I consider this a fair trade off.

But on a more serious note, the importance of writing and paperwork more than ever in sciences. Science is a funny old fellow. In nothing else does reputation matter so much as in science. You see, when you have no reputation, people don't know whether to think your crazy or actually saying something useful. Given how... erm... focused (yes that's the best word. Obsessive-compulsive doesn't have the same ring to it) a lot of research is, sometimes this s literally the only point of reference many people as to whether you're work is going to be interesting or not.

This leads us to the existence of that most strange of beasts, the academic conference! What a cesspit of sin and inequity these things are! Anywhere from 20 to several thousand people all grasp for your attention, with posters, presentations, talking, grabbing innocent passers by... its so... random. Admittedly I've only been to one (but that's soon to change...) but holy tit creepers. Sitting through 9 hours of presentations in one day... well fine that happens on occasion. Doing it for a week is pushing human endurance however (although the guy from Oxford that sounds like Brian Blessed is a riot. On a random note here's the one I went too, the second week I started my PhD). Which is occasionally a downright shame because of the presentations are exceptionally interesting (RF breakdown science for instance). This is of course padded out by the 60 pages in 20 minutes on brazing techniques.

But think about, in a week you have to get a scope of what possibly hundreds of other scientists in your area are working on. Not just this, but you have to show off to these people as well. Talk to them, tell them about your work (and get told about theirs. Quite a lot) and generally make yourself known in the world of *insert your subject here*. But then on the other hand you get to generally brag about how awesome you are. Technically you're showing off rigorous and respectable contributions to public knowledge, but I still maintain that there's still an air of just showing off whatever clever/impressive new thing you've done. Even if impressive is analysing data from a giant box of argon for 3 years to pick a statistically significant data sample to detect little particles. But such is the life of scientist.

But what happens when your name is tarnished? Well... in short, you're fucked. I don't mean a Peter Mandelson, "Blink and I'll be back!" screwed. I mean you'll have to change you career screwed. Like everything, you won't be remembered for the potentially good work you did, but for the epic fuck up you made. Be it for a sense of justice, the keeping the good name of science clean or just because people want to prove that you're wrong and their data is right, pain comes your way.

But seriously, its awesome!

When the beam sleeps, the scientists shall awake

Or otherwise known as, getting out of the corrugated steel jungle and into something vaguely resembling the real world.

Now as you might have guessed, CERN is a big place. A ridiculously big place. It is however a ridiculously big place filled with physicists. For those that know physicists they have a predisposition to, lets obsessive working. I don't just mean working diligently every day, I mean the fairly frequent post 9pm hack-a-thon of which the stuff of legends is made from. Which is awesome. Some of the time. This of course breeds a somewhat subdued restlessness amongst the populace. Some get over this by "working" more (I use the term working loosely here), others by drinking quite incredible quantities of booze (seriously, there's some epic drinkers amongst the physicist community. Quite scary at times), and some of us by burning off our energy is silly and somewhat random ways.

Like the high class sport of Jugger, ably created by that bastion of weird past times, the Germans. Its strange, it involves hitting one another with sticks, it involves time and a half counting, it involves a dog head for a ball (substituted with tape film due to lack of dead poodles). Well, see for yourself.

Not just this of course, there's a variety of random things that happen. Like a random mini-LARP festival in the middle of the French countryside. Complete with Trollball. Or maybe even searching through the tunnels of CERN. Or cycling from Geneva to Annecy, and back again.

Why yes, Geneva/France has something random for all of the family. Even more bizarrely, my little town of about 8,000 has 2 theatres. TWO! And three bakeries. All of which serve disgustingly good cakes and bread. I think you can see where this one is going. The next to the next best thing about here, FOOD.

ZOMG the food. Now realise this is France, you could eat at a different café/restaurant/bistro every day of the week for a month and still have some left to spare if you wanted to. But that's not half of the fun. The fun is realising that there are almost as many super-markets and random butchers lying around. All of which sell large varieties of food. And due to the huge Lebanese, Algerian and Slavic populations here, a good international selection too. So one should take advantage of this, naturally. So I tried making hummus It tasted of chick peas and garlic, a roaring success! Next on the list is fallafal, totally not just because I have left over chickpeas from the hummus. And spicy bean burritos. LIKE THIS. MANLY MANLY BURRITOS! I'll let you know how that turns out later.

And last and best of all. There is an abundance of pain. Not just normal pain, but martial pain, and food pain, and KORGOTH PAIN!

Why you don't let scientists write music...

Sung to the tune of Rasputin by one Boney M. Or if you're slightly more amp inclined, growled to the tune of Rasputin by Turisas

There lived a learned man in the lab long ago
He was smart and mad, in his brain a flame did grow
Most people looked at him with terror and with fear
But to data hungry gits he was such a cause of cheer
He could steer the beams like a sniper
Aline them finely with a wire
But he also was the kind of creature
Insanity would desire

RA RA RASPUTIN
Lover of the proton beam
There was a man that really was gone
RA RA RASPUTIN
Pilot of the big machine
It was a shame how he carried on

He ruled a certain lab and never mind the bar
But the collision he caused, really wunderbar
In all affairs of beam he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a bunch to squeeze
For the DG he was no wheeler dealer
Though he'd heard the things he'd done
He believed he was a holy healer
Who could do no wrong

(Spoken:)
But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger
for power became known to more and more people,
the demands to do something about this outrageous
man became louder and louder.

"This man's just got to go!" declared his enemies
But the machines begged "Don't you try to do it, please"
No doubt this Rasputin had lots of hidden trickss
Though he was a brute they just fell into his arms
Then one night some men of higher standing
Set a trap, they're not to blame
"Come to visit us" they kept demanding
And he really came

RA RA RASPUTIN
Steerer of the particle beam
They put some quench into his line
RA RA RASPUTIN
Pilot of the big machine
He turned it on and he said "Its just fine"

RA RA RASPUTIN
Steerer of the particle beam
They didn't quit, they wanted 7TeV
RA RA RASPUTIN
Pilot of the big machine
And so they quenched it, the plebs

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.