Hadrons

Following the read recorded at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hadron off to the Royal Institution last week to hear more about hadrons from Pippa Wells, who, when she is not being a particle physicist, also plays the violin. According to a CERN website, she was part of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, played with Cambridge University’s Symphony and Chamber Orchestras throughout her university days and now plays with the Orchestre Symphonique Genevois. Interestingly, for someone with this background, her native accents still come through and there were none of the fruitcake accents which the producers of Lewis like to give university types at the other place.

But I get ahead of myself. Otherwise suitable watering holes in Albemarle Street being full of the after office crowd, we elected to try Browns, the Mayfair version of the Goring tried out a couple of years ago (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=goring). The bar was crowded and cramped with a low ceiling, nothing like the bar at Langham's (see 18th September), served just the one brand of bottled beer (Chinese) and a surprisingly thin selection of wine, although the white wine that I picked out was perfectly decent. But the service was very smooth, they did very nice dressed green olives and they were much stronger, I think, on cocktails. Some entertainment to be had from the clientele with our being greeted by a large & floridly dressed lady with large fag hanging out of her mouth as she nipped out for a smoke and from an energetically necking couple in the corner of the bar. Very smartly dressed & turned out young woman and we did wonder what relationship she had with her partner. Was it of long standing?

Onto the lecture theatre at the Royal Institution, one of those old style lecture theatres with steeply tiered seats around  a large demonstrator's desk, complete with sink, in the well. Three large chairs had been set up facing the desk, with the middle one destined for HRH the Duke of Kent, who turned out to look a lot more like the presumably unrelated Duke of Edinburgh than I had expected. For a senior with less knowledge of physics than me (I assume), he did well to stay awake and look attentive, if not deeply interested. I was impressed; I could not do it for a living. The rest of the full house included some scientific eminences in penguin suits, more working scientists (some of whom might have fallen out of Lewis), some students, some children and some people off the street like ourselves, it being a public if not free lecture. There was a noticeable number of ladies in full war paint, some very attractive.

Pippa Wells talked for about an hour and took questions (at least two from children of precocious accents). She had good slides and was a good talker, making a good job of talking to a mixed audience, many of whom were not scientists at all and most of whom were not particle physicists. A good follow on to the Butterworth book.

She started off with the periodic table and moved onto a suggestively similar table of sub-atomic particles, a table which suddenly gave some meaning to the much bandied about term 'super symmetry'. She also made much of the business of taking lots - thousands if not millions - of pictures a second of the collision bit of the big ring. One got more sense of where all the femtobarns mentioned in the Butterworth post came from. There were also pictures and diagrams of bits of the big ring which I found helpful, Butterworth being picture lite. There were also graphs, with the elusive Higg's boson emerging as a not very large bump on a graph derived from some of the said femtobarns, from lots of collisions, collected up over months if not years. Not as if you could actually see, in any normal sense of the word, a trace of the boson flitting across one of the Wilson cloud chambers which were the latest thing to reach physics classrooms when I was little.

In the margins we took a peek at some of the other facilities, which included a small museum in the basement - lots of old style scientific instruments - and a café. All, it seems, open to the public. To be revisited at greater leisure.

Then, after taking refreshment in one of the now not so crowded watering holes, home via Earlsfield where I scored just the one aeroplane, passing the time between aeroplanes wondering how one would get over the chain link fence - some five or six feet high - if push came to shove. I settled for jamming some of the bits of masonry rubble lying around its base into the roughly square holes in the wire and then using them as footholds - but I did not get as far as experiment. Perhaps just as well.

At home, I got around to reading the Royal Institution leaflet I picked up at the door and their short courses look like something I could still cope with - so maybe something for next year. See http://www.rigb.org/education/short-courses.