| Notes from Chicago II | Lily Asquith, Life and Physics We've been in ChicagoLand for three weeks tomorrow, writes Lily Asquith. Haven't made any huge contribution to the Argonne National Laboratory physics programme yet, but have worked out which cafeteria queue to join to get the tall blonde lady who charges you about two-thirds as much as the small grumpy oneMy daughter Jessie had "Lockdown practice" at school this week. This is her description of it:Code yellowMeaning: There is someone outside in the grounds who wants to kill you.Action: Close blinds and windows and be silent.Code redMeaning: There is someone in the building who wants to kill you.Action: Turn off lights, lock doors and hide out of view. Jessie is going to get under the shelves.Fire alarmIf this goes off you have to stay inside the building in case it is really someone wanting you to go outside so they can shoot you.Tornado alarmGo outside to the lockers and get in a crouch position, look at the ground and not at anyone else.I had to buy this much candy from 7-11 to take our minds of gunshots and masked teenagers and screaming, terrified children.Most of these sweets are illegal in the UKPerhaps there is a link between Americans' paranoia and their diet. I wonder if candy companies occasionally run a special programme for unstable adolescents that involves weapons training and is succeeded by a large and sustained increase in profits.We moved into our house at the weekend. Our new neighbours came round with banana cake and invited Jessie to their evangelical baptist church youth group. On her third slice of banana cake she decided to tell them she is a Buddhist. They are a lovely old couple, but I sense trouble ahead. Since I reiterated to them that we are not Christians and don't believe in God this morning they have been round twice, once with six homegrown tomatoes and once with a bunch of asparagus. They are apparently not a cult but they hope that I will allow the Lord into my life.LHCsound has been given extra funding by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. We will be focusing on producing a workshop to take into schools and need to find some physics teachers for input. This is a great opportunity to enable people to experience the excitement of the LHC without having to spend several years at university wearing a zip-up cardigan. Hopefully I'll find the time to get involved with my musical colleagues again soon so that we can start making some teenagers into scientists.I've been thinking about event shape variables this week. I think the best way to get an idea of what is meant by an event shape is to imagine a glob of mercury. You can imagine it getting elongated and distorted in all sorts of ways. That's the picture that pops into my head when I think about event shapes. An event in the Atlas detector is the aftermath of a single collision. The protons smash into each other in the middle of the detector and the smash releases energy, then the stuff created from that energy flies out in all different directions. If all the energy (all the debris coming out of the collision) goes straight up and straight down with none going sideways, then you are going to get a tall thin glob of mercury. If the debris flies out evenly in every direction you get a perfect sphere. I'd like to make an animation of this mercury glob so that we could watch Atlas collisions in real time (we record about 200 events per second but we could filter out the rubbish ones - that's what we do on the physics side anyway).I have spent rather a lot of time in stores (shops) this week. I am trying to be inconspicuous but can't resist getting my camera out when confronted with this sort of thing:Basics sorted.Jon ButterworthLily Asquithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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