How is your thesis going?

Hehe. Slowly. I have nominally another year left, and I've started thinking about how I'm going to organise the beast. I haven't really started writing it yet, though.

I've got a couple of experiments done and some nice results, but the last year has felt a bit... hindered. For example, with one experiment, I took good data months ago, the beginning of the year, and the parts are starting to get dismantled, but I've been waiting for almost as long for the theorist authors to get over whatever hangups they seem to be having about what it is we've actually showed (I'm really not even sure why they're stalling, though I might guess) and start helping with writing the damn paper. It's quite frustrating.

And then there's an extension/followup to the work we published in Nature that we submitted mid-year to PRL, but we had... issues with the only referee report we got back (out of the two it was sent to). *sigh* Summary: Misunderstood both the context and the content. We managed to convince the editor to give the paper another go a few weeks ago. It's been sent to four referees now, presumably one of which is the same referee as before (for their opinion on our response). So, hopefully... *fingers crossed*

But, anyway, in the meantime I'm finally moving on to other things. Should be starting to set up a new experiment this week... maybe... hopefully... *toes crossed*

Good luck! It is all too likely to get messy when you have to depend on other people. Nature is tough enough.

Thanks. We actually had an easier time getting into Nature than this guy. Reading his response I found myself wondering if he even read anything more than the abstract.

Oh well, it's getting another chance, so that's good.

How long has that lazor been boring into your head?

Ow ow ow. Since ow I decided ow ow I needed an actual ow ow OW ow avatar here aaargh OW, 14ow months ago, so says my files.

So kindof a while, I suppose.

Uh...

I got a 17 mW green diode laser just for the fun of it. I can see the spot on a mountainside a mile away. Clouds are a lot more fun at night, too.

That's a pretty decent spec. You be careful, you could put someone's eye out with that.

Of course, we've got a 15 W green Nd:YAG laser in the lab, but that ain't going anywhere near the outside. Even in the lab, it's all enclosed, and only used to pump another laser (which gives 3 W in the infrared).

I'm not sure what the result was, but there was talk about banning your type of laser here in Australia. Some dickhead pointed them at planes and the media got all worked out about it. Way to ruin shit for everyone else, lowlives of society.

I was one of the members of the ANSI panel that created the original laser safety regs over a third of a century ago. I'm not going to zap anyone with that thing. I also worked on one of the first mid-IR chemical lasers - over 100KW continuously. It was R&D for anti-cruise missile defense for the US Navy, and is now being flown on a Boeing 747 for SDI at much higher power levels.

You win.

Wow, I want to say that is amazingly cool--all of it. It's all stuff I've read about, but I'd never expect to encounter anyone who has worked on any of those projects. =)

Plasma and laser physics are lots of shiny sparkley glowy fun!

Ooh! Actually, if I had more patience and a better attention span, I'd probably be in science as a career (I'm miserable at Calculus, though. XP). So I stick to artwork, but still have the highest respect for science. (My favorite channels on cable are all the educational ones. I love the stuff. =D )

I've been meaning to ask: what do you think of the Large Hadron Collider? Bummer that it's offline for awhile yet! But from the way New Scientist has been talking about it, I can imagine it's very exciting!

I've heard others call it the Large Hard-on Collider, jokingly--but for physicists, I figure it might as well be. =)

What sort of discoveries are you looking forward to?

I've heard others call it the Large Hard-on Collider, jokingly--but for physicists, I figure it might as well be. =)

Mmmmmmmwelllllllll... almost.

It certainly is very cool. More power to the people working on it, and it kinda sucks that it's broken down at the moment, but these things happen.

I'm not very intimate with the actual subatomic particle physics going on, as such, but my understanding is that they are trying to recreate and measure conditions that are at the limits of our current understanding. Which is always awesome, because when you look into these sorts of areas, history has shown us that you can get some pretty wild and amazing and ultimately very useful results.

For example, most people only ever experience the world through what they can see with the naked eye. But there's just so much out there, so much going on, both in the very large and distant to the very small and up close, that you simply cannot experience unless aided in some way with measurement apparatus. Think of all the discoveries in medicine, just for starters.

So I guess that is really what's so cool about what is going on at CERN, and perhaps something that has been glossed over somewhat. Sure, they have the huge ring that particles are going to go flying through, but the immensity of the precision detectors that they have arrayed in order to detect what is going on at the point where the particles impact is phenomenal. And the amount of data they will generate is enormous. More than a petabyte a month, expected. It's just staggering to think about what's required to transmit, store, and process all of that down to useful results.

As for the results themselves, it's hard to say. We're at this point where we think there's this thing called the Higgs boson. We think it exists, because in the best model of the universe that we have at the moment, its what theoretically causes stuff to be heavy, to have mass. So, you know, it'd probably be useful to know about. In particular, if it actually exists and corresponds with our model. The problem is that it's really freaking hard to actually find, which is why all this elaborate stuff to get into this huge energy regime is necessary.

It will not be a failure if we don't find it. On the contrary, that will simply be another mode of success. We may have to modify our model of how the universe works, if we don't find this particle, but that's still scientific progress. We're ruling out what doesn't work or isn't true, which is pretty much all that science can do, ultimately.

Of course, I couldn't let this pass without mentioning all this talk about, you know, "It might make a black hole that would destroy the whole universe!" That's nonsense for so many reasons for so many reasons it's hilarious. Ignoring the fact that a black hole wouldn't suck in the entire universe anyway, there's the model we have of the universe which I mentioned, which has worked pretty well with experiments and observations so far, and none of the best guesses we have based on that suggest such an event even has a remote chance of happening*. Even if something happened when the particles collided that might not be good, there's fact that these sort of interactions are happening all the time in cosmic rays all around us, and we haven't seen anything like a black hole suddenly form and suck an entire planet/system anywhere. Add to that the fact that most of the noise is made by people who don't actually have any expertise in what they're talking about, and it becomes quite hard to take any of it seriously.

We don't need to worry about it.

But, at the same time... I was telling a friend just last night that, actually, there is a part of me that feels... well... If we did actually manage to create a scientific experiment so powerful and so piercing that we manage to poke a hole in the fabric of space and time... that would just be something so immensely awesome and, in my opinion... it'd kinda be worth it. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see the demise of humanity (to quote a wise man, there's still many things I want see and to do and to have done to me), but to go out so spectacularly would be pretty epic.

And lulzy. But mostly epic.

As for Calculus, at the moment I'm actually using surprisingly little of it on a day to day basis (though if I wade too far into the theory of what I'm doing...), considering how much training based upon Calculus that I went through. Which is a bit of a shame, because I quite like Calculus. I like a lot of mathematics, though. I do not like rote learning. Maths is very clean and logical, and that appeals to me. It's just the kind of person that I am.

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As for the *, well, technically, according to quantum mechanics, pretty much anything and everything has a non-zero probability of happening, but that non-zero is typically so vanishingly small that the likelihood of anyone ever seeing it in their lifetime, let alone it ever happening anywhere throughout all of time and space, is for all intents and purposes, zero. I love pedantry.

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I hope that wasn't too long. But I suppose you're right: There's some exciting stuff going on.

According to the LHC website, a 30 ton transformer powering the liquid helium superconducting magnet refrigeration system failed. This is a very bad sign that something (such as political favoritism or bribery) is seriously amiss in their procurement system. That failure should not have happened. Reliable transformers of that size have been built for at least 70 years. Every major gold mine in central Nevada has at least three transformers of that size, and I've never heard of any of them failing. The LHC is a big buck program, and I'll bet that no scientists were on the committee who chose the vendor to build that expensive transformer...