And on to physics

Physics in the form of a chance pick me up from the new acquisitions shelves of Epsom Library: 'Smashing Physics' by Jon Butterworth.

He turns out to be something of an amphibian, lurking between the worlds of the media and physics, and writes in this book mainly of his time as a large cog in the huge machine known as the LHC - the large hadron collider - at the time of the hunt for the Higg's boson. A chatty sort of book, a chatiness which irritates at times, but one which does give one something of the flavour of this sort of science, a collaborative endeavour involving thousands of scientists, some of them actually at CERN, underneath the borderlands of France and Switzerland.

An endeavour which involves a lot of very expensive & glamorous machinery, a lot of computers and a lot of statistics. A long grind to run down the elusive Higg's boson, lurking somewhere in the huge heap of statistics, the volume of which is measured in somethings called femtobarns - and one gets one insight into the size and sophistication of the CERN operation from http://writing-guidelines.web.cern.ch/entries/inverse-femtobarn.

One supposes that there is still a need for scientists to burn the midnight oil in lonely garrets, to pore over long pages of equations or statistics, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, but this book paints the bigger picture, a picture of a peripatetic bureaucrat of science keeping his show on the road while managing to retain his enthusiasm for his subject.

On the down side, while I learned a few words like supersymmetry, muon and gluon, as with most of the books of this sort that I have tried, I do not feel at the end that my grip of the science involved has been much strengthened. I guess I have unrealistic ambitions in that department. But I do learn this morning, from their website which, for some geeky reason, I am unable to paste into this post in working order (but google, luckily knows all), that CERN is a broad church with Romania a candidate member and Serbia an associate member, both on the way to full membership. The same Serbia whose ruritanian and sanguinary political culture has moved on so little from the end of the 19th century that they today unveil a statue to celebrate the murderer whose murders (of a relatively clean and decent archduke and his innocent bystander archduchess) triggered the first world war. More usefully, if I ever need to know what a muon is again, this web site also includes handy summaries of the physics, nicely pitched to my needs and aptitudes.

PS: was the failure to paste in any way related to Chrome, Google and some internet being up, while HSBC, Amazon and Ebay were down? A down which lasted, on this PC at least, for more than an hour. {Later still: BH heard on the news that this was a BT problem. I guess that the symptoms I saw arose from certain big sites having special arrangements made for them, arrangements which went wrong}.