One of Michelangelo Mangano‘s lectures described how delivering kicks to a proton dislodges gluons from their otherwise invisible lives. Please note the ISR (Initial State Radiation) in this painting, which was also inspired by the quantum field theorists’ success in doing away with all those nice little Greek-style “atoms”; apparently, reality is now made up of identity-less “excitations” of some fundamental “stuff”.
In other words: Pending the repair of the LHC, some of the less immediately useful members of the collaboration (a.k.a. yours truly) has reverted to armchair philosophy and the occasional excursion into physics.
Or… not really. Do tell the boss that this blogger still remains:
- a graduate student of UCSB
- working hard (ahem) on triggers / dataset definitions plus whatnot
- getting a Beyond Standard Model search ready for launch
- (incidentally?) setting up groundwork for thesis
