ILC is in the news!

http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5000077

I'm glad the article doesn't mention CLIC, the competing design for the next collider, because the ILC is the road to the future! At least I hope so :)

Fission and Fusion

Today I'm going to post one of my favorite graphs. It's a simple plot of the binding energy of different elements against the size of those elements' nuclei, but its implications are deep enough to drive furious research and millions of dollars in spending. Wikipedia explains the basic idea of binding energy nicely - it's the energy required to take apart a nucleus into its individual protons and neutrons. When you go the other way, putting nucleons together to make a nucleus, you increase the binding energy and release kinetic energy that can be used by us in some form or another (many nuclear power plants, for example, use this energy to generate steam to run turbines to generate electricity).

Getting to the point, here's the graph. When you grok how it applies to getting energy from fusion and fission, you will say, "Woah."

Fusion and fission are processes that change the number of nucleons (atomic number, A) of an atom. The energy they release is equal to the difference in binding energy between the before element and the after element. Fusion combines small nuclei to make bigger ones, so fusion takes you from left to right on the graph. Fission breaks apart large nuclei into smaller ones, so it takes you from right to left on the graph. Iron (Fe) is at the top - both processes stop there.

Visually,


Nuclear power plants work by fission, from right to left. Look at the difference between Uranium 235 and the next few elements down - not much of a difference in binding energy. Not much energy is released to be used.

Now look at the difference in binding energy between hydrogen (H) and helium (He). Yeah, pretty impressive! I love this graph because it so elegantly and subtlely tells you exactly why power from nuclear fusion is such a holy grail.

Python ternary operator

Holy crap, a year and no update. In an attempt to get things going again, here's a simple post of something I keep looking up online.

Python has no ternary operator (?: in C++)

Instead, use an and-or construction:

In [1]: True and 'a' or 'b'
Out[1]: 'a'
In [2]: False and 'a' or 'b'
Out[2]: 'b'

Replace True and False with the condition:

In [3]: (1==1) and 'a' or 'b'
Out[3]: 'a'
In [4]: (1==0) and 'a' or 'b'
Out[4]: 'b'

Edit:

One failure of this method is then 'a' or 'b' can evaluate as boolean values. Examples of this behavior:

In [1]: True and True or False
Out[1]: True

In [2]: True and False or True
Out[2]: True

In [3]: True and 1 or 0
Out[3]: 1

In [4]: True and 0 or 1
Out[4]: 1

In [5]: True and 'a' or ''
Out[5]: 'a'

In [6]: True and '' or 'a'
Out[6]: 'a'

So you see that if the first return value evaluates as false, the second value is returned. I'll post a solution or workaround later, when I find one.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

From Symphony of Science - all of a sudden, Auto Tune is incredible (props to my cousin for the original link).

I have a few comments on this video. First, I love the chorus: "We are connected to... the rest of the universe, atomically." It makes science personal - this is our connection to stars and galaxies! The carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that constitute human beings are the same elements that make up the largest structures in the universe. When your coach tells you to eat steak for the iron in it, it's the same iron that triggers a supernova.

And it isn't just the existence connection that's exciting; it's that the connection is miraculously on the smallest level! That's a big reason why I'm excited to be working on a particle accelerator - even physics on the smallest scale seeks to explain our place on the largest. The scientists in the video reflect this: Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are astronomers, while Richard Feynman pioneered quantum electrodynamics - physics on the subatomic level. These are three of the greatest communicators of science in the modern era, and it's no coincidence that they come from opposite ends of scale.

Secondly, I love the way they speak about the universe. They treat it with an almost mystical reverence - "We are made of starstuff - We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" - it makes science exciting, a fundamental part of human endeavor and passion. "Nature's imagination... he is never going to let us relax." Nature as a living, breathing antagonist makes the quest for understanding seem so much more epic, more seductive, than nature (lowercase n) as a simple set of rules to solve.

Unfortunately, I have seen the way we talk about science in the public forum trend more and more toward dry, impersonal descriptions of algorithmic processes that lack any sense of wonder. "How do you do science? You test a hypothesis, and if it's wrong, you just check your assumptions." That is nearly a direct quotation from a thread in a forum I read once - how boring does that sound! Who would ever want to spend their life on something so formulaic, so lacking in creativity? I suppose on some level it's true, but statements like this really disguise the mystery and difficulty of forcing the universe to cough up its most closely-guarded secrets.

As an aside, it is my opinion that this decayed, insipidly stale portrayal of natural processes is in large part the result of the intelligent design debate. Intelligent design advocates are so intent on reinterpreting language, not facts, to support their theories that scientists have become afraid of anthropomorphizing Nature for fear of giving their opponents ammunition. "Evolution tries..." "The universe wants..." - these phrases are slowly being purged from our scientific vocabulary. Personally, I think science will survive all the better if we remember to keep it interesting and attractive to new people, and simply let pseudoscience wear itself out.

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this?

No, really, the LHC might be under attack by particles from the future

The idea that the Higgs boson is traveling backwards in time to derail its own discovery has been featured lately in the New York Times, among other places, but it sounds like scientists are just making stuff up for why the LHC isn't working yet.

Here's an intelligible explanation that completely blew my mind.

Interim Update

I have been pretty busy lately and at a loss for what to write, as will be explained below. My girlfriend visited recently, and we had a great time. She wrote a little about what we did here so feel free to go check out our trip to Vienna - my first trip outside Krakow that was not related to work!

Science-wise, I am super busy editing a report about the current work of the FCAL collaboration for a review committee. It has been my intention for some time to give a good explanation of the role of my particular detector, but I've refrained from doing this for two reasons. The first is that editing the report and reading the work of others, who work on detectors that perform similar or complimentary roles, has helped me gain a better understanding of how my detector fits into the big picture. The second reason is that LumiCal isn't a particularly glamorous detector - it won't be detecting new particles or extra dimensions. Instead it plays more of a "background" role, so trying to make it interesting and relevant to people is a bit of a challenge. I promise I'll give it my best shot.

Soylent Green

Here's a scary thought: If the world human population continues to grow at 1.14% per year, then we only have about 3,000 years before the entire mass of the Earth is converted into people. Good news, though; there is hope! We could reduce birth rates or let war, disease, and famine level out the human population, OR we could colonize the solar system. I know which one sounds a lot cooler.