Partical Physics
Phew. It’s been a long couple of weeks, but I’m pretty much moved in now.
So, I’m apparently a lecturer in physics at Manchester University, and no longer employed by HM Govt. It’s been a busy couple of weeks to say the least, as I’ve been out of the university arena for some years. I’ve joined the Particle Physics Group (also confusingly called HEP - High Energy Physics), and am a couple of doors down from fellow group member Brian Cox (whose site is much better looking than mine). It’s been a steep learning curve getting ready for the teaching load, but being given the nuclear physics lab is kind of nice, as I think I understand it. I’ll let you know after tomorrow’s first day! Universities are a lot more lively than when I was an undergraduate, and there is a real buzz about the place. It’s a bit like being in a hospital - everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and where they’re supposed to go, but there are few signs about. The ones that are there can be confusing (see picture!). Bit by bit I’m picking up what I’m supposed to be doing, which is teaching and research basically…
Fortunately, my office in Schuster is with the other physicists, and not in the old Rutherford Building, which is part of the older quad of buildings on Oxford Road, and I think now occupied by psychologists. People have commented on a possible link between the deaths of five people who all worked in the building, but given the very low levels of radiation so far measured (it’s been a hundred years guys) I’m betting it will turn out to be another leukemia cluster. In other words, it will be a random clustering of events that people call attention to because they are looking for a specific, well-identified cause. There is a lot of psychology in that activity - maybe the building occupants will look into that!
Hopefully unconnected with my arrival is the rather amusing decision by the Student Union to re-classify the toilets from men/women to with/without urinals (in the words of Al Murray, ‘I was never confused’). Transgender students have perhaps correctly pointed out that there is an uncomfortable choice to be made about whether to have abuse thrown at them by either women or men, depending on which door they go through. In typical student fashion, there is a backlash from more conservative student groups who wish to maintain a clear gender divide for their own comfort. The union representative on that there TV (who had surprisingly green hair which made me forget her name) seemed a bit non-plussed at the media attention, but gamely held her own on the rights of all to choose. Good on her. For me, the amusing part of the story is that anyone would want to use any of the toilets in that building. They are after all rather dingy.
Bouncy Castle
The SRS: now just so much junk
Today was a rather surreal experience.
Now that the SRS has finally shut, and before the men with spanners start to dismantle the accelerator - some parts of which are over 40 years old - the site has been opened to staff (and the many ex-staff) for a full Sunday. It was a strange experience to come as a tourist to my own place of work, and even stranger that for the event the lab has decided to include a funfair, classic car rally, and birds of prey exhibition. I’m not really sure what any of that has to do with synchrotron science, but maybe it brings in the punters. Unfortunately, the bouncy castle and ‘megaslide’ (whatever that is) were both stolen last night, so the funfair consisted solely of rides next to our decrepit site stores building. I’m not quite sure why it’s best to put playing children near to piles of scrap metal, but there you go.
The celebratory aspect of the day seemed a bit misplaced to me, since there is nothing really to replace the facility, and more than a few people are being made redundant. It was doubly poignant for me as I’m leaving the lab myself in a week’s time, and I worked closely on the SRS for some years.
Oh well…
Of course, the open day was timed to come just after the last SR user meeting to be held at Daresbury. Besides the expected eulogies to the varied research that was done on the SRS, there was an interesting presentation by Jon Marangos, project leader of the ‘New Light Source‘ (what a terrible committee name that is). The science case has been completed, and is available in draft form for comment before final submissiong for funding for the design stage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it calls for a high-repetition rate X-ray FEL suite (i.e. above 1 kHz), albeit without much technical definition that ties the experimental needs to hard accelerator parameters - the lack of which may or may not come back to bite as it did on 4GLS. Maybe it will get sorted out during the design phase.
Those ‘in the know’ realise that high repetition rate basically means superconducting cavities, since normal-conducting ones can only operate in pulsed mode under 1 kHz. And there are plenty of accelerators being built around the world that will do that - so won’t get funded in the UK. A superconducting design would be kind of nice, since I published a design for one of those a few months ago. Ok, so my design is based on ideas from a number of other people (WiFEL, LBNL etc.), but I think it’s quite good. Maybe they’ll ask me to carry on working on it even though I’m leaving.
Bringing Light into a Dark Age
So, the BBC were here at Daresbury Laboratory today looking at one of the accelerator projects I designed - ALICE. ALICE has been chosen as a new name for ERLP now we are doing experiments and extending what we want to use it for. ALICE is really good for preparing tiny bunches of electrons for all sorts of experiments - making X-rays using Compton backscattering, driving a Free-Electron Laser, and injecting test bunches into our new EMMA ring (which we’re building right now), which we hope will eventually make radiotherapy treatment of cancer much better and cheaper. Brian Cox will be talking about this on NW BBC later I think, and also talking about how the North-West has contributed to physics and nuclear energy. Remember, without Manchester University (where I studied) and Mr. Rutherford, we would have unsplit atoms, and therefore no nuclear energy to keep the lights on or many other things that need an understanding of the atom, like basically all modern science. Also, without Manchester we would also not have had the first proper computer.
Orbach on Orbach
Science magazine has an interview with Ray Orbach today. The important points he makes are these:
The US is basically pulling out of ITER. As often happens at this time, he’s keeping the accountants going at the expense of real work:
‘What we’re going to do is to keep the ITER project office’ (at ORNL)
We won’t do any physics, but will keep the typing pool. Great.
To those of you working at FERMILAB, he said:
‘…we preserved the Tevatron run. And in order to do that, the B-factory had to be shut down early at SLAC‘
In other words, be thankful you’re in a slightly more Republican part of the country. We stuffed those hippies on the West coast to save you.
And to the ILC people, he had this to say:
‘ I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels…. You don’t have to convince me. You don’t have to convince the president. It’s there. Now we’re talking about the American people.’
He’s saying that ILC hasn’t sold itself enough to the American people. Which is true.
Cults
An interesting news story today: A video has been leaked of Tom Cruise going on about his views of Scientology. I’ve posted the video below. I find it particularly interesting as it almost makes sense - but not quite.
Like many pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-scientific arguments I have seen, Cruise makes use of similar kinds of general statements to those of conventional religious systems - ‘helping people’, ’solving problems’, ‘linking cultures’ - but without ever going into specifics, or getting into the sort of detail that’s actually quite crucial to understanding the basis of their beliefs. Now, this video could have been edited to make Tom Cruise look foolish, but I believe that it’s been put together like this deliberately by Scientology film-makers.
Why make general statements like this? It’s because people like simple answers to problems., and headlines let us make snap judgements without having to bother about actually learning about an issue. This is why politics works. For example, Ian Pearson - the Science Minister - recently said ‘we have put up investment in UK physics by 13.6%’; it takes a little digging to work out that it’s all eaten up by complications such as FEC, VAT, fixed international subscription limits and so on. But voters care about headlines.
Similarly, when we think about religion it’s easy to pigeonhole people based on headlines about them. Scientology gives more traditional religious beliefs a bad name, because it plays on the headline-grabbing psychology which is hard-wired into our busy, subject-hopping brains. But consider this: if religious and philosophical belief were simple enough to work out in 5 minutes, then people wouldn’t have been arguing about it for thousands of years, which of course they have.
Ask yourself another question. Which book has undeniably had more influence on human history than any other? Obviously, it’s the Bible (or maybe you don’t believe that - but think about what other book has had such an impact). Now, whether or not you believe it’s all claptrap or think it’s good or bad, have you actually read any of it? Before you come to a premature judgement, read up on the subject, so you can make your own mind without headlines. But what do I know? I’m a Virgo and it’s well-known that Virgos don’t believe in astrology.
I’ll leave you with Tom in all his glory in edited highlights below. The full video is here.
[wp_youtube]ZQXLuWz6OqU[/wp_youtube]
The Naked Civil Servant
I had a media training course at work today. I didn’t know much about it beforehand so I didn’t really pay much attention to the tutors or the bios that had been provided. However, as I listened to the female tutor, it slowly dawned on me that I had heard her sultry voice somewhere before.
Of course! It was Susan Alexander, BBC journalist and presenter extraordinaire, telling us how to talk to the media! How cool was that? And she was very impressive, and not a little intimidating. I no longer have a disdain for arts graduates - this one really knew what she was talking about, and was sharp as a tack. No bullshitting possible here. The reason I didn’t make the connection before then is that all of us compartmentalise our lives, and don’t expect to see things or people out of context: I would have had the same trouble if I had gone to sit down on the sofa in my living room and found the Queen sitting there.
But then I realised something else that had subconsciously stopped me from making the link from radio to reality: every previous time I had heard Susan’s voice I had been naked. Naked, because when I listen to Radio 4 at the right time in the morning I’m nearly always in the shower. I didn’t mention the naked thing to Ms. Alexander though: I thought she might find it weird.
The Queen likes DIAMONDs
The Queen will visit DIAMOND tomorrow. Although the facility was commissioned some time ago and has been operational for users for a few months, the official opening ceremony is today (even though it’s not listed on the website).
Brings a tear to my eye (sniff)…
International Linear Collider - not anytime soon
The DOE and Ray Orbach today released their updated interim report on future facility funding. This is important as US funding policy has a big influence on whether big accelerator projects get funded, wherever in the world they are sited. Unfortunately, ILC has not made it onto the ‘Near-Term’ list, but is at the top of the ‘Mid-Term’ list, or 13th overall. This means ‘not building it any time soon, but keep going on the design work’. Actually, this is not too unusual, especially for a project of this size. When we worked on DIAMOND, we started out in 1993 with the Woolfson Review and the machine was only commissioned in 2006.
You can just imagine a call centre at DOE: ‘You are thirteenth in the list. Please continue to hold. Your project is very important to us. We are sorry for the continued delay in funding your project.’
You can read the updated interim report here. It’s interesting to see the order of priority they’ve put the accelerator projects in:
- LCLS - under construction, so not surprising it’s at the top.
- Rare Isotope Accelerator - not yet being built
- CEBAF upgrade - been on the cards for a while, and to be built by our good friends at JLab.
- ILC
- SNS power upgrade (What an amazing machine that is - the target chamber is something else).
- SNS second target station
- RHIC II
- NSLS upgrade
- Super Neutrinos
- ALS upgrade
- APS upgrade
- eRHIC/eLIC
The perceptive among you will notice that ‘multi-user’ facilities feature highly (i.e. those facilities where multiple experiments may happen simultaneously); well over half are facilities of this sort.