Lots of Happenings

Lots to post about, and not a lot of time (story of my life).

First, the LHC in Geneva started without a hitch. Everyone is cheering because the world didn’t end, but it’s a little premature. All that happened was that a packet of protons circled the ring a few times in each direction, but not simultaneously. The tests for simultaneous packets circling in opposite directions will happen sometime soon. Once that is a success, then they’ll start smashing protons together. However, they will not get up to full power (a total of 14 TeV) until sometime next year! So that’s when the world ending will happen.

Second, I was in Jerusalem last weekend. I was actually there on the first Friday of Ramadan and was also in the streets as all the Muslims made their was to the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount for the afternoon prayer. That prayer is one of the most attended prayers of Ramadan, which meant there were 90,000 Muslims crammed in the streets at that point. I have pictures and I will describe the trip more later. It was an incredible experience!

The purpose of this post, however, is mostly just to keep in touch. I’ve been studying my brain into mush these past few weeks as I have an exam on “Modern Experiments in Particle Physics” on the 22nd. (That’s also why I feel that I can somewhat speak as an expert about the goings on at CERN.) Which reminds me, I was at CERN and took tours of both the CMS experiment and the ATLAS experiment. I forgot to take my camera, but the whole group pooled their pictures together on one DVD. I need to get my hands on a copy when I’m back in Konstanz for the exam.

Anyway, there were some interesting happenings here at the dorms tonight that I wanted to share. I was sitting eating dinner with my roommate Joe (dinner was a scrambled-egg-filled pita) when we notice the lack of commotion outside. The street our dorm is on is usually pretty busy. That’s when we notice that the corner that the dorm sits on was completely blocked off! The side of the apartment that faces the streets unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) has virtually no windows, so we were climbing all over ourselves trying to see out and see what was going on. That’s when I came up with a great idea: “Hey, let’s go outside to see better what’s going on.” (Smart, run towards the danger! I remember learning something about “survival of the fittest” in school . . .) No sooner had Joe agreed that I had a good idea than the air was filled with a loud bang. “Shit, we missed it!” I said. But we still went outside to look anyway. Turns out it was nothing. Someone had called in a suspicious package sitting on the sidewalk across the street and the police came and blew it up. Pretty standard procedure here for suspicious packages. Actually, I kinda like that philosophy: don’t know what it is, so let’s blow it to smithereens!

So all is safe and sound here . . . and exciting!

I’ll post more info on everything later this weekend. Need to sort my photos first.

Chris