It's only funny if you're in the audience...

I am going to be heading to Geneva (CERN) Nov. 10, getting in on Nov. 11, for a three day conference on the coming upgrades to the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (I worked on the New Small Wheel due to be installed in the next couple of years, but I am mostly working on the replacement for the inner tracker [ITk] due to be installed in 2025 or so). From there, I will be flying to London, and then taking the train to Oxford where I will be staying until Dec. 4 (commuting to/from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the weekdays). If you're in the area (where area is quite a broad notion with tremendous flexibility... I will at least be popping into London from time to time), and care to get together for some tea or a pint, let me know.

Also, I have posted the latest instalment (i.e. the second one) of something I'm experimenting with called Phelonius' Pedantic Solutions where I solve a physics problem in painful exacting detail, where I moot the mathematical and conceptual tools needed as I go. In essence, this is the kind of stuff I wish I had when I was doing my undergraduate degree. The latest just builds and solves the differential equation for exponential growth/decay that is used in just about every field of science and engineering.

Decay and growth rates

My first entry was Relativistic energy expansion, which uses Taylor expansion on the relativistic version of E=mc² to reproduce a comment in Griffith's particle physics textbook.

I would have preferred to have posted them on Dreamwidth, but I needed MathJax and the last couple of times I've checked, it just wasn't supported. YouTube seems to be broken as I post this, so no video today...

I am heading to Geneva today (arriving Friday morning local time) for a 10 day stay at CERN to participate in a workshop on the sTGC (small-wire Thin Gap Chamber) detector DAQ (Data AcQuisition) system. The sTGC is part of the NSW upgrade (New Small Wheel... where "small" is extremely relative as the "wheel" is 10 metres across) to the ATLAS (worst acronym ever, makes me cringe every time, A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, ugh) experiment at the LHC due to be installed in 2019. Once past the alphabet soup, I am very excited to be going as this is my first time there!

If you are at all curious about the New Small Wheel project (and/or the sTGC in specific), here is a good summary article on the subject. If you look at the group picture of the testbeam team at Fermilab, I'm the bald guy at the back in the CKCU t-shirt...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405601415006719

Important note: the article is not behind a paywall :). You can download the PDF.

Sadly, at this point, it's all a blur. The week itself turned out to be mostly an intense learning curve amidst a fine bout of jet lag, punctuated by an occasional meal out with a pint here and there (okay, maybe more pints than that). On the Sunday after I arrived (I got there on a Saturday), I found out that there weren't really any breakfast places in the neighbourhood that opened in time for me to go to them on my way to work, so I went to that little shop near me (which was actually surprisingly useful and of fairly good quality... it's on Woodstock Road in a little mall with a dry cleaners place, etc.) and purchased some eggs, milk, vegetables, cheese, ham, pesto, and some apple juice so I could eat before leaving. I had forgotten to buy butter, so the first omelet I had was fried in cheese and pesto. It was good, but probably not so good for me. I bought tea, butter, and bread Monday evening ;). The guy I was working with has to take his child to school so did not get in until 9:30AM or so (quite civilized as far as start times go, imho) and that meant that I needed to be on the 8:40AM Science Transit Shuttle to RAL from Oxford. I pretty much needed to be up at 6:30AM Oxford time to shower, eat, and get to the stop on time. The project was successful! He met me when I got there, so it worked out pretty well and he got me a temporary visitor's pass to enter. I got a proper pass a little later in the week, so I could then let myself in and out of the facility. That also means I can add the Diamond Light Source as another particle accelerator facility I have been to (so far, the list is TRIUMF, Fermilab, and DESY). I didn't have time to try to get a tour (much less go on one), but I do hope to be back in the future and will plan ahead if that happens.

As reported in an earlier post, the food there was pretty hit or miss, with more misses than I would have liked. As such, I started buying ingredients to just cook in my flat and made a lovely vegetable-heavy chicken marinara-inspired sauce that I had with penne and a piece of that bread (which was just Tesco in-store bakery bread, but it was very dense but still quite soft... quite yummy) with butter and some wine (which is sold everywhere along with bottled beer). I did try and check a bunch of things off my "food to do" list while there, so Monday I went to a thali restaurant at the end of George Street and had an enjoyable meal with curry and lots of other yummy, tasty foods (that was a hit). As an aside, it irks me that not more Indian places have thali plates... it is just kind of wrong for one person to go in and order a full plate of one thing (like palak paneer), much less more than one thing, plus rice. Even with a couple of people, having a mixed plate makes for a nicer meal I find, since doing a set of full plates and sharing is best for four people and up. Just my opinion anyway. My other success that week was going into a pub called The White Horse in Oxford on Broad Street (just next to the famous Blackwell's Books, more on that in a later post). It definitely felt the most "British Pub" to me of all the places I'd been to that point, and I understand it was often featured in the show Inspector Morse as a setting for a pint (for example, in the episode "The Dead of Jericho"... I've set the clip to start in the pub, it's only a few seconds, fyi). I got another "food check mark" as well as I ordered Toad In The Hole there (along with a couple of pints). The dish was basically a giant Yorkshire pudding bowl filled with potatoes, peas, sausage, and broccoli with a pot of their onion gravy on the side. I had never had such a Yorkshire pudding presentation before and it was just the right amount of crispy and was fluffy in the right places, absolutely a delightful meal! The ales I had were also delicious and were made locally and poured using hand-driven pumps set into the bar (another first for me). The temperature was absolutely perfect (below room temperatute, but definitely not cold) and the bubbles were small and refreshing and made the brew a tasty and easy to drink experience. I'm now a big fan of properly brewed and served ales, and will have to wait to cross the pond again because I've never had it anywhere else in the world I've been to (and I hear that pubs are endangered in the UK... several were pointed out to me in the UCL area in London as either being torn down to redevelop the area or were bought out by yuppies and turned into wine bars or something... definitely a tragedy because it is unique to there it seems). Note: the fucking terrible meal I had at Browns Brasserie & Bar was on Tuesday I think... definitely before the meal at The White Horse (which I think was Thursday), so the latter event definitely redeemed the possibility of UK restaurants to me. As a final aside on this part of the tale, there is also a White Horse Brewery in Oxfordshire which, gasp, has beers available in The White Horse pub. The brewery's slogan is "We brew beer to drink & what we have left we sell". Lol! They definitely do more traditional tasting beers, which I really appreciated, as so many small breweries are doing IPAs that are overwhelming in their flavours (North American style as one co-worker put it). These were flavourful, but balanced (although they do make IPAs as well... not ones to balk at a market for their products, heh).

As for productivity, I was able to see every phase of the testing that needed to get done: from changing the wafers, to aligning and setting the height on the probe station, to running the tests and adapting as things went, to making enhancements to the software driving the probe station and running the tests. I finally got a chance (once things were running semi-automated) to do the first real deep dive into the data acquisition code for the system and learned its architecture. Fyi, my job there was to decipher what is needed to test the integrated circuits on the wafers at the lowest level so that I could take just the part that tests the chips and duplicate it on the systems at the company we are partnering with here in Ottawa. Basically the company is a traditional integrated circuit test house whereas the folks at RAL are physicists that have put together their own system and process... the two are inherently incompatible. Again, I need to learn what is being done in the physics labs and turn that into a process that can be run on industry standard equipment (and again, that involves understanding the test software and hardware down to the level of when and how to set each bit, what commands to send, and what measurements to take). By the end of the week, I had a pretty good idea of how to do it and was at least able to start asking precise, and useful questions that could then be answered by the experts on the system. If you want to read up on the ATLAS experiment ITk (inner tracker) upgrade project, there is a good introductory presentation here (PDF). I am learning how to test the ABC130 front-end integrated circuits while they are still on the wafer, before it is diced into individual chips for assembly. Note that because of the unique constraints of building an inner detector, as little material as possible must be used to minimize the chances that particles from collisions will interact with the non-sensor parts of the system. As such, the chips are never packaged: they are glued and wire-bonded onto a thin kapton printed circuit board, which is then glued to a huge silicon sensor where the chips are then bonded directly to the individual channels of the detector. This is a very strange configuration and it's weirding out anyone in the electronics industry we talk to about it ;). One negative comment I have to make about the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is its cafeteria is absolutely atrocious... I will never forget the half fat and grissle pork chop plopped on a plate of grey beans in a flavourless grey "sauce" as long as I live (seriously, we're talking concrete grey here)... and that was the best option they had that day at the 8 or 9 stations they run... although it was still better than that meal I had at Browns (remember, it was in the top 3 worst meals I've ever had... doubly so because of the price).

Finally for this installment, that week I finally managed to finish the book "Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame). Good lard, that man needs to get over himself. It was probably the most pompous and long-winded book of "fiction" I have ever had to slog through... this is a guy who loves to hear his own voice and wanted to make sure that you were exposed to every little bit of data he had and research he had done on the subject of Antarctica. If you poked him with a needle, he would fweeeeeeeee around the room like that gas bag beach ball alien in Dark Star (as an aside, the fact that they managed to give a beach ball that much personality is an amazing cinematic feat, see below). Go ahead, ask me how I felt about reading it over the months it took me... ugh. Here is an actual sentence, one sentence, from page 2 (page 2!)... and I'm not making this up, it is verbatim: "And so there you are riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky gradually lightens to the day's one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming on the ice, and all of it tinted the same vivid indigo as the sky; everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you've ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you are all alone in it, the only witness, the sole inhabitant of the planet it seems; and the uncanny beauty of the scene rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because the world is so spacious and pure and beautiful, and because moments like this one are so transient —impossible to imagine beforehand, impossible to remember afterward, and never to be returned to, never ever." There are 651 pages of that and I'm glad there is nothing high for me to jump off right now. As with his other books, it is technically brilliant and researched in a manner that only Robinson can and does (he, in fact, spent a season in Antarctica in 1995 as part of the National Science Foundation's "U.S. Antarctic Program's Artists and Writers' Program and you really do get to see the sense of wonder he felt at being in such an alien place on our own planet). Where it falls down heavily (writing style aside) is that the characters are completely forgettable, if not unbearably annoying (and not because that's part of their character, they're just badly written). If this had been presented as the diary of a "personal journey" (a work of non-fiction), I am sure I would have enjoyed it much more, but trying to hammer every bit of knowledge and feeling he had into a thinly hung together plot with hollow characters did his experience there a great disservice... it was also one of the "whitest" books I've read in a while (and that is not a snow reference). I don't know if he needed a better editor or what, but this book is definitely never going to cycle into my "hmmm, I should read that again" pile (his Mars trilogy does fall into that category, so... it was because them that I persevered on this one). After that, I turned to Becky Chambers' book "the long way to a small angry planet" which proved a wonderful palate cleanser and was as much of a page-turner as Antarctica was a page-dragger (I'm still glad I read it because it's interesting seeing other people's visions of such a strange place, but ... 'nuf said). More on that later as I think I need to wrap this up now. Thanksgiving dinner is nearing completion and I should get back to it... yes, I picked up my car yesterday evening after my flight (it was parked at Carleton while I was gone because they were paving where I live... it's done now), went to the grocery store and wine shop on my way home, and am making a big dinner today (well, okay, Beep and Happy are doing the vegetable stuff and I'm doing the meats... a cured pork shoulder steamed in apple cider to be served with pineapple, a Quebecois meat tourtiere, and a pre-cooked chicken since they were out of turkeys at the grocery store I went to).

I have so much I want to do, so much pent-up desire (and sometimes need) to accomplish so many things after eight years as a "mature" (or at least elderly) undergraduate student. So many business ideas, so many technical ideas, so many geekly fun for myself ideas, so many social ideas, but I remain mired in making it from one day to the next. I really should have taken some time off to get my head straight, but it just didn't work out that way (in fact, I had negative amounts of time off because I started working for the university part time months before my semester was over, and was full time before my finals were written). With all that said, the reason was the bane of my hopes to accomplish the things I want: opportunity. The chances to work on things too cool for school (if you'll pardon the phrase as I am still, for all intents and purposes, at school) was too much to resist. It comes at a cost though for sure.

So where are things now, well, as stated, I am working on some truly amazing projects right now. These include both the Phase 1 (New Small Wheel muon tracker/trigger [not actually very small, fyi], in particular the small-wire Thin Gap Chamber, sTGC, sub-project that I did the testbeam at Fermilab for a few years back as a student research assistant and got authorship on a peer-reviewed journal article by working on) and Phase 2 (silicon inner tracker, ITk, in particular the end-cap strips sensors sub-project) upgrades for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which will be upgraded to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Detector with the replacement of the inner tracker system in 2025).

If all goes well, I just applied for a 5 year work visa for the UK (by way of UK Ancestry... my grandfather was born in Measham), and if I get it I will go for two weeks in mid-September (I've never been to the UK) to help test 48 wafers of a new batch of ASICs (integrated circuit chips, 450 per wafer) for the ITk project as part of a plan to start testing wafers here in Ottawa. There are hundreds of thousands of ASIC chips and thousands of sensors to be tested for the final detector, and we need multiple sites to do it at... Canada built the forward calorimeter for the current incarnation of ATLAS, and is working on the gas-filled detectors, the sTGCs, but this is the first time we've done silicon trackers like these, or at least on this scale. Anyway, if the visa thing works out, I might be going to RAL in the UK periodically over the next few years to work on this particular aspect of the project. I was supposed to make a side trip to CERN for the "ITk Week" where physicists from all over the world working on that project get together (I've never been there either, but I have been to TRIUMF, Fermilab, and DESY), but we're not sure when the wafers are going to be in, so it's kind of up in the air right now whether or not I make it to Switzerland (which I've never been to either).

I am also working on the Cryogenic Underground TEst facility (sorry, a PDF is all I could find that was public... slide 2 is worth checking it out for), CUTE (yes, CUTE...), which is an experiment that is part of the search for dark matter that will be installed at SNOLAB, 2km underground, early next year. It is going to use a 1kg chunk of ultra-pure germanium as its main detector element (huge for something like that, and crazy expensive). I have heard rumours that I may be asked to spend 6 weeks underground (well, heading underground each day... 5AM, ugh, but this will be for science!)... the first two weeks training (it's an active nickel mine in Sudbury, so there are real mining dangers on top of the danger of just being that far underground), and the next four weeks actually doing work. I had a chance to visit SNOLAB a couple of years back (I never got around to properly posting about it, which I am sad about), but I did post a couple of pictures I took while there. It really is like a villain lair from a Bond film or something... it's pretty surreal.

The other cluster of reasons why I am still not even close to being recovered from my undergraduate degrees is moving... and not even me. Firstly, my partner (we've been dating for a few years) could not find full time employment (much less anything with benefits) here in Ottawa (due to the way the federal government outsourced language training to a cartel), so had to move to Shanghai, China (teaching English as a Foreign Language) to get a living wage and extended medical insurance (we have universal health care, but it doesn't cover everything... like prescriptions and glasses and dental work unless they are outrageously expensive treatments or emergencies, for instance... I wouldn't trade it for the world having lived the alternative for a suffiently long time, but that's another story). She moved mid-June and that effort just about killed me dead (international moves are big things, I've done them before, but she didn't have a lot of resources, so sweat replaced money for a lot of things that had to get done). I did a radio inteview with her the week before she left that you can listen to here about her path through life that led her to where she is now. Her contract is for 15 months, but I am going to go visit her in Shanghai for two weeks in November! I've never been to China, so I am very, very excited (and Shanghai is a good introduction without going too deep, although I do hope to do one trip into another part of the country while I'm there). I was just starting to recover from that crazy process and my eldest daughter Beep finally decided to move out with two of her friends into a relatively nearby apartment. That happened last Saturday and it is still a work in progress (although 99% of the move is done now). It went relatively smoothly, but she had a lot more stuff than she thought she did, and it was a really hard job (moving hide-a-beds up from the basement here left some amount of injury, but nothing that's slowing me down too hard... I'm just freakin' exhausted). I'm heading over once I post this to her place for her housewarming party, and will be bringing a couple of serving spoons (she only has a ladle at the moment since her and her roommates didn't coordinate "stuff bringing" particularly well, heh), and a homemade vegetarian pizza to cook (I'm just waiting on the dough to finish and will bring the prepared ingredients in bags to assemble there). Her two roommates are effectively vegetarians (one will eat meat, but only if ethically sourced from personally known farmers), and I think that will be good for Beep (she's a whiz with vegetarian foods, we have always eaten a lot of vegetarian meals at home here). She is also continuing at college (Algonquin) in their Culinary Management programme, where she is learning to be a chef and to be able to run a kitchen or even restaurant. It's a good portable (almost universal) skill to have, and could open up a lot of doors for her all over the world if that's what she decides she wants to do. She is also talking about taking a degree in antropology at university eventually, and that would pair very nicely with a background in food... could be interesting, but we will see. Tuition is now free for low income families in Ontario (that'd be us, give or take a bit), so it is financially easier to go to school for both of them too (I completely missed out on it as it is only starting this fall). Happy had planned to move out at the start of the summer, but didn't quite get around to it, and for many reasons, has decided to stay with me for at least another year of school. She is going into her second official year in the psychology programme at Carleton (with minors in Women's and Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies... she has grown up around a broad spectrum of gender representations, so she is well placed to make contributions in those fields, imho). School starts for both of them in a week, so that's going to take a lot of effort on my part as well (if history is any indication). I do have to say I'm not looking forward to Carleton being packed to the rafters with people again soon, summers are so nice there...

My radio show, The Passionate Friar, is still going pretty well: an hour of feminism/social issues, physics/science, and music... news, reviews, interviews, ideas, engaging audio, and the Oxford comma! I've managed to up my game with interviews this summer and hope to keep the momentum going forward (I need to get more lined up for September now, but I think I will try more phone interviews, so it opens up a lot more possibilities). The shows are available "on demand" for somewhat over a year, so there is lots to listen to if you want to hear the people behind the physics (and science) and feminism (and social issues) you may hear/read about and benefit from. The list of shows to choose from is here on the CKCU web site. It's a long-form show (an hour), with some music for good measure (so it's not an hour of just talking). It gives a chance for people to warm up and share the stuff they are really passionate about and have devoted at least the current part of their lives pursuing. Some recent stuff includes: Ryan Couling and Matthew Johnston about their research into social media reactions to the Jian Ghomeshi trial; the writers for, and the editors and publishers of, the new young adult anthology Brave New Girls: Stories of Girls Who Science and Scheme; Lori Stinson on her research which ranges from patterns of pornography consumption, to corporate manslaughter and homicide laws, to the changing federal family violence initiative; Alex Nuttal on disability tropes in comics and Barbara Gordon /​ Batgirl /​ Oracle; S.M. Carrière about creating characters or talking with/​about people that don't share your lived experiences (e.g. LGBTQA+ if you're not, women if you are a man or visa versa, etc.); neuroscientist turned social worker Dr. Elaine Waddington Lamont; an interview with Canadian new wave synthpop band Rational Youth; an interview and live music with Xave Ruth on the intersection of math, music, and comedy; Dr. Michael Windover, historian of architecture, design, and material culture on his research, exhibits, and book on early radio in Canada; outgoing Carleton University President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte about her French poetry, writing, and research; theoretical physicist Dr. Thomas Grégoire; science education innovators Martin Williams, Ian Blokland, and Mats Selen (2015 US Professor of the Year); Cindy Stelmackowich on the history of Canadian women in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics (STEM); etc., etc., etc..

Needless to say, every Wednesday morning, my mind is totally blown and I can be excited about life and everything in it all over again. It's good to be The Passionate Friar!!!

Lastly, and on the topic of "mind blown", if you're in Ottawa September 11, please come out to the Carleton University Art Gallery for the vernissage of the art gallery exhibit I helped to curate and produce! It's an amazing collection of artifacts from early women scientists in Canada and tells both the story of the tremendous contributions they made, and the forces that were arrayed against them simply because of their gender. It has been an indescribable privilege to have participated in such a unique exhibit. From the CUAG list of upcoming exhibits:

HERbarium
11 September – 03 December 2017
Curated by Josie Arruejo, Chelsea Black, James Botte, Brigid Christison, Michelle Jackson and Sharon Odell; in collaboration with Dr. Cindy Stelmackowich.

So, what is a “herbarium?” and why is she the focus?

A herbarium is a collection of dried and preserved pressed plants or fungi that are stored, catalogued and arranged systematically for study.

In highlighting the “her” within HERbarium, this exhibition focuses on the highly skilled and too widely unknown women who contributed to the collection, identification, illustration, production and distribution of early scientific knowledge within the field of botany in Canada.

Because of the accessible nature of botany close to home, and a national pursuit and desire to see, describe and classify flora and fauna species that were distinct from Europe within a then-young Canada, botany was the first natural science formally practiced by Canadian women.

With examples of path-breaking contributions by Catharine Parr Traill, Lady Dalhousie, Faith Fyles, Dr. Irene Mounce and Dr. Mildred Nobles, this exhibition looks back at an important and underrepresented history. It also includes a copy of the “Privy Council Letter, 1920 – Women, Marriage, Employment” which outlines the federal policy in effect until 1955 that prohibited a woman upon marriage from continuing her career as a federal employee. The exhibition also looks forward at the continuing need to encourage women to pursue careers in science, where they face ongoing discrimination on the basis of intersections of gender, race, sexuality, dis/ability and class.

This exhibition has been developed for the Carleton Curatorial Laboratory in collaboration with Dr. Cindy Stelmackowich as part of her seminar “Representations of Women’s Scientific Contributions” offered through the Pauline Jewitt Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University.

If you're there, come say hi! I'll be the old, fat, bald, white guy standing awkwardly in the midst of many very cool and diverse young women ;). I do have to say that it was one of the most amazing courses I have ever taken... when I saw the title of the course, I knew there was no way I could not sign up; however, I had assumed it was going to be more research and essays and maybe classroom discussions. I was wonderfully, wonderfully wrong... it was many, many excursions to the hidden collections of Canada's national museums, practical hands-on work with many brilliant classmates, deeply engaging conversations about women in science (both historically and today), and working far outside my comfort zone on so many things. It was an absolutely magnificent way to cap my B.A. Honours degree in Women's and Gender Studies.

If that doesn't work, and you're here on October 17th... to the best of my knowledge, I should be there for this as well (see above re: potential travel to the UK or maybe even SNOLAB):

HERbarium: Exhibition tour with the curatorial team
Tuesday, 17 October 2017, 7:00 p.m

Please join us for a tour of the exhibition HERbarium, which was co-curated by Josie Arruejo, Chelsea Black, James Botte, Brigid Christison, Michelle Jackson and Sharon Odell, in collaboration with women’s and gender studies professor Cindy Stelmackowich.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome! CUAG is an accessible space, with barrier-free washrooms and elevator.

It does run until December 3, 2017 and I'd be happy to pop by if you get a chance to see it (just let me know a day or two in advance). I will be going in right after my show on Wednesday (August 30, 2017) to lend a hand or two in helping to set up the actual exhibit. It's delightful that we were actually able to get some amazingly rare artifacts to (safely) put on display, including Lady Dalhousie's 18th century personal herbarium, a first edition of Catherine Parr Traill's groundbreaking 1865 book "Canadian Wild Flowers" (a limited print run of 500 units, each with 10 colour plates, hand watercoloured by family members, it was the first "coffee table art book" published in Canada), amazing botanical artwork and science by Faith Fyles, and mycology (mushrooms and fungus) samples and other work by the pioneers in the categorization and study of fungi Dr. Irene Mounce and Dr. Mildred Nobles from the mid-20th century. The reproduction of the “Privy Council Letter, 1920 – Women, Marriage, Employment” (which was the "smoking gun" for so much of what we were trying to document regarding the limitations imposed on women) is just jaw dropping to read.

Just writing that, I feel like I need to go back to bed...

For a video today, hmmm... I think I need to repost something I seem to post every once in a while. The first video, "I Tak Bez Konca" by Polish musician Karolina Kozak is the United States I remember fondly and saw as the possibility of the place. Filmed in Savannah, Georgia, it often brings a tear to my eye (I actually know the people in the coffee shop from when I lived in North Carolina... it's a small world). The second video is the United States that we see on the surface and is the one the world is carefully watching: "I'm Afraid Of Americans" by David Bowie and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)... which will ultimately win, and at what cost? This is another place where a tremendous amount of my energy is going these days, just wondering if I'll have time to realize that nuclear war has broken out before me and my children and friends are all dead (we live in a national capital). I lived through the 70s and 80s, and I had hoped these days of fear were behind us. They are not, and I think it is even more dangerous (and possible) today than it was then given the multi-axis instabilities and extremism (and by that I mean established governments, not non-governmental groups) we are seeing all over the world. The Bowie/Reznor video sends chills down my spine when I watch it.





If that's too depressing... how about this song from Zepparella's original lineup (I have serious respect [and other feelings] for the drummer, she doesn't mess around when it comes to playing those things):



So much to live for still, let's get our shit together.

Received minutes ago...

Dear Phelonius Friar:

I am pleased to inform you that the Senate of Carleton University, at its meeting of June 2, 2017 granted you the following degree:

Bachelor of Science
Honours
Physics
Minor in Mathematics

This degree will be conferred at the Convocation ceremony held on June 13, 2017 at 9:30 am. Please bring your campus card with you for registration purposes. Please visit http://www.carleton.ca/convocation/ for complete details regarding the June 2017 Convocation ceremonies. You may also view the list of medalists approved at the June 2, 2017 Senate meeting. Graduates also enjoy discounts at the Carleton University Bookstore. Please visit them at: http://www.bkstr.com/carletonstore/home for details.

On behalf of Carleton University, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate you on this important achievement.

Yours sincerely,
Suzanne Blanchard
Vice-President (Students and Enrolment) and University Registrar

I just had to open a new package of Nihon Rikagaku chalkboard chalk because I used up the previous package earlier today. I am at home. The professional grade chalkboard is in my bedroom. I am a colossal nerd.

40 hours until the exam that will decide whether I graduate or not. I am studying as fast as my writer's cramp will allow me to (I'm redoing all the problem sets as a study tool and correcting any mistakes I had made as I go). I'm on question 4 of 5 on problem set 3 (quantum perturbation theory) of 6. From problem set 1 to here has already been 26 pages of dense equations, and there's a similar amount to go. I hope to get done today (I figure there's a 50/50 chance), so I can go over my notes and the (shitty... Gasiorowicz 3rd. Ed.) textbook and flag important stuff tomorrow (it's an open book, open notes, open assignments exam... which means it's going to be hard, hard, hard).

Just in case you want to play the home game, here ya go: Quantum Mechanics on The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind. It's surprisingly easy to follow with a bit of high school math and an open mind (and maybe some alcohol so you're sitting in a Balmer Peak or some such... I've inflicted it on a mathphobic English major friend and they made it quite far).

And, while we're on the topic (nerds, not quantum mechanics)... this is lots of fun!

A book. What even... I just don't know...



P.S. Did you know that when you eat a banana it produces antimatter (positrons) inside of you which annihilate with your body's own electrons to produce high energy gamma ray photons (through the well-known relationship E=mc²) that fly out of you (and probably the building you're in... they're way more powerful than x-rays) to radiate the surrounding environment? Now you know.

Welcome to 2016, and Happy New Year! Out with the old and in with the new: after 5 years (!!!) on the radio, The Dollar Bin and my follow-on attempt at a show Doing It On The Cheap are no more, but please welcome The Passionate Friar to CKCU’s airwaves. Same host, same timeslot, but a (hopefully) very different show. Sandwiched as it is between talk programming (The Tic Show... err, Wednesday Morning Special Blend, and Hans’ CKCU Literary News) and music programming (Permanent Waves with Erik Stolpmann), the show aims to make that transition over its hour. It will start with a chat, some news, and sometimes interviews on the twin (and generally, but not entirely, exclusive) topics of feminism (and social issues and social justice) and science (the backbone of our civilization, with an emphasis on physics, the most fundamental science) — both of which are the subjects of undergraduate honours degrees that I am working on at the moment (a year and a half to go, ugh). There will be some music between the talk segments at the start, and the show will transition to just music by the end... found music mostly, where I will play music that I did not specifically set out to find, but have wandered across anyway (in that regard, The Dollar Bin lives on). P.S. I’m looking for correspondents on all three topics (feminism, science, and music) going forward, drop me a message if you are interested!

From the show’s new home page (this will be the blog associated with it, that was easy):

An hour of feminism/social issues, physics/science, and music...
News, reviews, interviews, ideas, engaging audio, and the Oxford comma!

This is a show for everyone who is passionate about more than one thing, and anyone that loves the simple, small joys of forever encountering new ideas, and having new experiences. While specific passions are going to be presented — simply because it is what moves this Friar in the moment, oh and time limitations, let’s not forget that — the intent is to do so in a way that is accessible to all, to get your creative juices flowing, to make your day more varied, and hopefully even provide inspiration for whatever your particular passions might be.

While what is presented here will truly be only the tip of the iceberg for this Friar’s passions, and the passions of those whose voices and works and actions are featured, the topics are sufficiently broad that it will take years to even get started exploring them. Specifically, this show will be focusing on three primary subjects: feminism and social issues, physics and science, and music and more music. Where, along with a foundation in feminist studies, comes the more general topics of social justice, aboriginal issues, issues of migration and human rights, intersectional identities (don’t worry, terms will be explained as we go), LGBTQ+ issues, globalism and neoliberalism, accessibility and disability issues... the list goes on — in short, social issues in general will be covered. And then way over here, we have the so-called natural sciences, which study the natural processes of the world around us and provides the underpinnings needed for the successful development and deployment of technologies, which then forms the functional backbone of our many societies. There will be an emphasis on physics because it is the most foundational of the natural sciences, but not a single field of science does not touch us somehow in our day to day lives: biology, chemistry, Earth sciences (geology, meteorology, ecology, oceanography, etc.), space sciences, and again the list goes on.

Why feminism and physics? Well, the simple answer is that I am in my last year and a half of independent honours degrees in both of those subjects: officially, I’m working on a B.Sc. Honours Physics (Theory Stream) degree, but I have also been collecting all the credits I need for a B.A. Honours Women’s and Gender Studies degree (I should be done that process this year, where I will not be done with physics until 2017, sigh). I came to Carleton as a “mature” student to finally study physics after a career designing and building electronics and software, and doing international project management on technical projects, while raising my children as a mostly single parent (by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever done... they are adults now, which is why I was finally able to go to university for the first time). Decades ago, I had a flash of inspiration/realization that synthesized much of what I read about the nature of the universe. I assumed I was wrong because I was ignorant in some critical way about it, but the more I read, the more it looked like I might be onto something, and the more evidence there was that there was value in the approach I had envisioned. I further assumed that someone else would come up with the same approach, but that apparently didn’t happen either, thus when my offspring were old enough, I quit my (very well paying, waaaah) day job and became a full-time student (mmmm, Kraft Dinner, sure I’ll have another bowl). The summer after my first year I took a course that aligned with several of my other passions: Feminist Disability Studies. I was hooked. Badly hooked. I have always been a social activist, and this wasn’t my grandmother’s feminism: it was new and exciting and inclusive and raw and full of dangerous pitfalls and irreconcilable differences. I took all manner of feminist studies, indigenous studies, language courses, and political science courses, and one day went into the Women’s and Gender Studies Department where they stared at me like I had two heads and announced that I was, randomly, most of the way to a minor in the subject. By taking the remaining courses for the minor and one more core course, all I needed to do was chip away at getting qualifying feminist studies credits in parallel with taking my physics degree (which was taking me longer than I had planned... that stuff is hard!), and I ended up with enough credits for a full major, and then an honours degree. I can assure you that nobody is more surprised than me! Due to university regulations, I need to graduate from my physics program before I can apply to the women’s and gender studies program, but I will just need to sit around with my thumbs up my butt and wait for the end of that semester because I will have all the credits I need already (okay, I won’t be sitting around, I’ll probably be doing physics research, but I won’t need to take courses).

Music? Well, if there is one language that is shared by all people, it is the language of music. Music is also at the core of everything I do (yes, including physics). Over the course of five years of doing The Dollar Bin on CKCU, I have learned much about how to find and present found music. For the most part, the music I played on the show was on CDs I had purchased for $3 or less in “dollar bins” wherever I travelled, and were by artists that I had never heard of before. Every show was the presentation of the outcome of the series of adventures I had listening to these previously unknown-to-me artists. I blissfully ignored genre boundaries and mixed music of all styles and origin and time period to create (what I have been told by others) was a challenging and engaging hour of music. Some of the songs I will be playing will be specific to topics I will cover, but I will continue the strong tradition of bringing intriguing found music to the airwaves (without the limitations I imposed on myself with The Dollar Bin — it’s all fair game now!).

Feedback is always welcome, along with music and topic ideas (especially if I can interview you or you can suggest someone to interview). I am also looking for correspondents (every/anywhere, and every/anywho) to do research, interviews, and produced segments on the topics covered by this show. You can reach me at dafriar23@gmail.com.


_{Photo credits... Top: “In The Body Of A Dragon”, a view of the curving tunnel of the decommissioned HERA superconducting particle accelerator/synchrotron at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. Photo by me, 2014. Bottom: “Don’t Let A Label Silence You”, a student group feminist activism project I participated in on ways to destigmatize mental health issues done as part of the Activism, Feminisms & Social Justice (WGST2801) course at Carleton. Photo by me, 2013. As a note, the radio segment done with my classmates as part of that campaign (we took over The Dollar Bin that week to do it) ended up with the, now defunct, CKCU feminist radio show Femme Fatale being created by one of the participants, Lilith (they had never heard of CKCU before then).}

And we are back into heady territory with Maria Spiropulu's Master Class "Nature's Constituents". This is a course on pretty much everything we know about how the universe functions at a subatomic, particle physics, level. It's a bit more dense than the other sessions I've done, but I have to say that I actually learned stuff in this one (important stuff for me even) that I did not know about before. In particular, her discussion of how a Higgs field was discovered on someone's desktop in 1981 was quite an amazing side topic (for realz... not the Higgs field we built the LHC to observe, but a Higgs-like field in a laboratory setting, very cool stuff... was pretty much forgotten about until all the fooferah about the Higgs particle discovery, and has since been dusted off). One of the things I like about her presentation is she's not afraid to say, "well, we have no fucking idea whatsoever"... which is the utter truth in that regard. She's also very brave in suggesting that the LHC may find the lightest hypothesized supersymmetric particle in this current run (which would be even more revolutionary than having found the Higgs as this would be completely new physics). Here's an intro video for more info... it's pretty mind-blowing stuff (but pretty straightforward to understand as a concept). If supersymmetric matter exists, it might explain the fact that most of our universe is made of stuff we can't observe and know almost nothing about (except that it's there and affects things gravitationally, and is causing the expansion of our universe to speed up).

Do you think we will ever be able to comprehensively describe all of nature in a single elegant equation? Why or why not?

I do not think that is possible due to the existence of chaos. Given that we cannot analytically solve systems that contain more than two of anything (the famous "three body problem", where there is no general solution to these classes of systems), to suggest that we can come up with descriptions of anything but the simplest of systems (luckily, some quantum systems like the Standard Model qualify) would require a revolution in our ability to express these systems mathematically (and even then, we have proven that past a certain complexity, some mathematical forms are unsolvable with all the math we currently know). With that said, there is obviously some underlying structure to our universe that we have not yet discovered that will provide the connection we need between gravity and what we know of the phenomenology predicted by the Standard Model. That the Standard Model is parametrized is a glaring recognition that we don't know the "why" behind the model (it just works startlingly well when applied). Understanding how the parameters arise is definitely something I think we will eventually figure out, but that only gets us so far. Can the existence of baryons and bosons ever say anything about the nature of a flower or the latest pop song? Looking for an equation for "all of nature" is too grand of a question, but finding out "everything" about the constituents that make up these phenomena is certainly something that we will be able to describe some day. A single elegant equation? Maybe not that (the days of analytic solutions may be coming to an end, all the "low hanging fruit" have been picked), but we will at least come up with reasonably simple models that we can solve numerically with ever more powerful computers.

I saw a post in the comments that I felt the need to answer as well (for myself more than anything): i can't perceive the difference between the notion of "luminiferous aether" and the "Higgs field"?

The main difference, from my understanding, is precisely that: perception. The aether was proposed as a preferred inertial frame that all motion was relative to (including light). As such, you would be able to tell whether you were at rest or not by measuring changes in the speed of light based on what direction you were going relative to that light. Einstein's stroke of genius was stating the obvious (based on experimental evidence even, the Michelson-Morley experiment for instance) and running with it to find out what it implied, and it says that the speed of light is the same to all observers no matter what their state of motion, so such an aether cannot exist. The Higgs field does not provide any kind of reference or directionality, and thus can only be detected by setting it "ringing" with the injection of massive energies (thus forming Higgs particles, which we can detect the decay products from). Particles that can interact with the Higgs field acquire mass from that interaction, but whether the particle is here or over there, or standing still from my perspective or moving at nearly the speed of light relative to me, the Higgs field must obey the principle of relativity. What that means is that if you have a particle in front of you, not moving, it will couple with the Higgs field in a particular way, but if you take that same particle and accelerate it to nearly the speed of light, the Higgs field has to couple with it in exactly the same way as it did when it was at rest relative to you. To illustrate this, pretend you could sit on the particle as it accelerates to tremendous speed relative to the Earth... to you and the particle, you are sitting perfectly still and the Earth is moving away at tremendous speed... since you are "at rest" from your perspective, the Higgs field couples exactly as it did before you accelerated relative to the Earth and the mass of the particle from the Higgs coupling, from your perspective sitting on it, is exactly the same as it was when it was at rest in front of you before it zipped away. This is how the aether and Higgs field are fundamentally different notions. Caveat: I'm no expert, this is just my understanding, I could be wildly wrong about the Higgs field (but I'm pretty sure about the aether part, heh).

In many of the other Master Classes, you've heard theorists describe how they try to understand our natural world. In this Master Class, you've learned a bit about how an experimentalist goes about the same task. Which do you find yourself more inclined to, the theoretical side, thinking up new science to explain phenomena, or the experimental side, being hands-on and trying to discover incredible evidence?

Getting personal, eh? Well, I have a lifetime of experience doing practical/experimental stuff (hey, a roof over my head and food on the table is important to me), but my personal interest has always been more on the theoretical side. I like to think that having a grounding in the demonstrably possible provides for the possibility that theories I might come up with are eventually testable. I think we do need people that are focused on theory and many times more that are working on experiments, but I see it as a spectrum rather than a binary choice, hopefully with those who are extremely one way or the other being outliers on the curve. Being able to communicate between the two domains is critical for progress to be made. I should add that communication skills are key to being able to keep doing science, because without it society will lose interest and eventually take its resources somewhere else.

The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest scientific undertakings in all of history. It is estimated to have cost somewhere around $13.25 billion (USD), including operating costs of about $1B/year since it became operational in 2008. Do you think that's money well-spent? (I actually think this was a pretty good answer, btw)

The first thing to realize is we didn't take 13.25 G$ and set fire to it in someone's back yard for a barbeque, it was paid to research institutions, manufacturing companies, services companies, government departments, and the salaries of tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, project managers, highly skilled tradespeople, and general labour ... all over the world. All of the capabilities developed to build and run the thing, all of the innovations created to solve problems we've never faced before, all of the infrastructure put in place to support it (including network infrastructure as well as industrial and intellectual infrastructures) have returned on that investment since then, and will continue to do so for decades to come. As a bonus, we get to pursue fundamental questions of existence (and as a double bonus, it was money that wasn't spent developing ways to murder other members of our species with new and more efficient war-making capabilities). All in all, to me, it seems like a pretty good way to have spent that money.

In this module, we've learned about how ideas from condensed matter physics were able to inform particle physics. Do you see so-called "cross-fertilization" as being something that has to happen again and again in science in order to deepen our understandings of the natural world?

It doesn't need to happen... brute force and ignorance (and lots and lots of money) could win the day, but I don't think too many people want to take that route. To that end, cross-fertilization (multi-disciplinary exploration) is a powerful tool to figure out new ways to search and new places to look for interesting phenomena related to the many questions we know are trying to answer (or for ideas on what questions we should be posing, and how). The main problem is there are so many silos of information with so little cross-communications. In some cases, it's from people wanting the power that comes from control of information; but in most cases it's simply the truth that people are so busy with just trying to do what they have to do that there is no time to pursue what they want to do (presuming they want to do this sort of information sharing and synergizing). In that regard, physics is no different than most other professional pursuits. I find it fascinating that "Higgs" (Higgses? Herds of Higgs? ... need a new plural form for non-boson Higgs-like entities, heh) were created back in the early 1980s, but that fact was lost until the publicity frenzy around the Higgs particle discovery. I wonder what insights could have been applied to the search for the Higgs boson if that line of inquiry had been pursued actively since then (35 years is a long time, and much could have been discovered)? I strongly believe that developing "desktop analogs" of quantum and/or cosmological systems provides an excellent way of having many more eyes and hands and inspiration devoted to answering important questions (one of my favourites of these recently is the production of black hole optical analogs in Bose-Einstein condensates... a much safer endeavour than trying to make black holes large enough to study carefully over long periods of time).

In April 2015, the LHC began its second run, with collisions at much higher energies, as it searches for (among other things) the long-sought supersymmetric partners. But what if we don't find any new particles at the expected energy scales? Would you advocate for building an even bigger machine to search for them? Or is it time to spend that money elsewhere?

There's some talk that perhaps colliding baryons is too sloppy for precision physics and we need to build a massive electron/positron collider (the ILC). Certainly if the LHC can be upgraded, it probably should be (rather than scrapped in favour of something like the ILC... much like so many facilities were scrapped or nearly scrapped when everyone's money was put into building the LHC in the first place). So yes, I see value in upgrading the LHC (especially since it can also accelerate large nuclei) and I don't think that conflicts with building the ILC as well (which last I heard will be in Asia, possibly Japan... there seems to be no stomach for it in North America at least, and Europe has CERN).

Hmmm... video posting this time around? Hmmm... Going to go far afield for this one and post one of my favourite songs/videos by FKA Twigs (nothing to do with physics, but she certainly uses a lot of it in this video with seeming natural giftedness, heh).

I have been ever so gently brushed with the most peripheral of emanations from the recently awarded Nobel Prize in Physics by my presence at Carleton University (and the fact I just recently visited SNOLAB where the science happened... with Dr. David Sinclair himself, no less, as our "tour guide"). Here's some links and a few more pictures I took on that trip:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/press.html

http://carleton.ca/our-stories/story-archives/nobel-laureate-thanks-carleton/

Dr. David Sinclair, founder of SNOLAB, expounding in SNOLAB:



A look down into a new working area. SNOLAB is already a cleanroom, but smaller temporary ultra-clean cleanrooms are sometimes set up within it for specific experiments (often for cleaning and assembly of sensitive components). You can see one here (the tent-like thing) and another that was open but could be made into a cleanroom again if needed. For scale, those are full height grey storage shelves toward the top of the photo, and a workbench to the left (the green hose thing on the right of the photo above can be seen on the bench in this picture... it's taken from pretty high above). One of the experiments we saw being worked on there was DEAP, an experiment that will be looking for direct evidence of dark matter interactions (a thing we know almost nothing about, and have never observed, but which seems to make up 27% of our universe).



This photo is a reminder that SNOLAB is 2km underground. First, the white coating over the rocks is to keep the dust and small rock fragments from falling into the laboratory that is cut out of the rock. The yellow plates (which are everywhere) are terminators for huge cables that were driven deep into the rock surrounding the human-made caverns, and that keep the surrounding rock under tremendous tension so it doesn't just relax and collapse in on the hole we have dug to work in. Apparently if the blowers ever stop for maintenance, you can sometimes hear rock quakes (and sometimes even with the blowers going). I have been told it is one of the most terrifying things a person can experience.