Quantum Diaries

I recently spent a week at a conference on and island in sunny Greece, Naxos.  I had my phone and e-mail access, but it is amazing how fast you feel left out.  Some of it is because I unsubscribed myself from some overactive mailing lists, and some happens because folks have assumed that I would be 100% offline.  

I even started to work on a post, but was sidetracked a bit by talks (and nice sunny weather).   It has been increasingly difficult for me to post with any regularity.  I am as excited to be working here at the LHC as everyone else, but somehow that energy gets spent on things other than blogging. So this is my last post, I’ve decided not to continue any more.

Since I started we went from a very incomplete system (cables missing, etc.) to one that is an integrated part of CMS.  A lot of hard work, some scrapes and sore muscles, some very long days (and nights)…all for a better Regional Calorimeter Trigger.

The recent delay was a discouraging, but these things happen. The LHC a very complicated system, running in a very new way. I hope that we can use this time to polish our system. 

Thanks to everyone for their interest and comments.  Its been fun!

All the best,

Pam

Tomorrow is the big day – we are getting lots of briefings about what to say and what not to say, where we are allowed to be, etc.  I have read a lot of press about it too.  But what I find most amusing about the articles are the comments.  It tells me more about how people see us than anything else, which is wildly different from person to person, based on what they see as important to them in relation to the this big experiment.

Science has always been about trying to understand some sort of phenomena.  For high-energy particle physicists it is about exploring the nature of matter, at energies never seen before.  

But the LHC and all its experiments have a human side too, because nothing this size could ever have been built in isolation.  To construct something this large required collaboration on a grand scale, both money and resources:  human and material.  People work together, towards one common goal, with no concern for the other person’s origins or affiliations, since we have a job to get done, in time.

It has been wonderful to meet and work with people whose countries I may never have the chance to visit, and I think it is something people often forget about when they comment in these articles. We have overcome personal prejudices and barriers put up by our own countries to come together and work towards a common goal.  

I am as anxious as the rest to see it work and analyze all the data, but I don’t want to forget all the wonderful people I have had the pleasure to work with.

The other day, I was sitting in a French branch of an American fast-food chain (I’m sure you can guess which one) grabbing a quick lunch during shopping on a typically busy Saturday. I was waiting for my husband to return with a couple of sundaes for dessert, and I watched life’s little dramas from our little table going on around me. One little girl completely dumped a salad on the floor, her mother just looked back and sighed as the worried-looking girl was deciding what to do about the matter (it was left there, but the box was carried away, and it was cleaned up a few moments later by an employee). Another youngster followed his family into the restaurant, then promptly stood fixed and proceeded to start crying (perhaps it was too busy for him at 12:30 pm). The matter was resolved by one of the adults picking the child up and bringing him to their table.

The little dramas occur all the time here. While we rarely have any sort of tantrum (though at times I feel like it), sometimes we do stand or sit there wondering what we do now, curse a little, or just sit there, head in hands.

Mostly, these occur because we have forgot some vital step or value to enter, and we cannot figure out why its not working. Though we are getting closer to the 1-click configure, there is still some way to go.

Sometimes we’ve done something stupid. On the computer, I’ve pressed the wrong button and wiped out all my e-mail programs Inbox. Sheepishly, I had to ask our system manager to restore it if he could restore it.  I only lost a few recent ones, luckily, I guess.

Or just plain bad luck. After hours of work, we finally start going, and the cooling fails.  On Wednesday we had a brief, CERN site-wide, power outage. Then on my way to the experiment to turn things back on, I hit a curb with my car, the front tire went flat, so I changed the tire.  After I got there, I found a board that blew its fuses, and spent hours trying to get something to configure, as the program kept crashing (with no useful information), and then I tried power-cycling one of the crates I was using.  After that, it worked.  At 7pm I was finally ready to go home.

A la prochaine

p.s.  Sorry this is late!  Family came to visit and I just lost track.  Next week we have a period of running the detector, so there should be some new and interesting stuff going on!