Suspicious labels and tags found at CERN

Today, Mikaela told Maikel something that he had not notice during all these years at CERN: labels.

In particular, she told him that the trees at CERN carry some mysterious metallic labels.

Maikel could not believe it, so he had to take a walk with her around Restaurant 1. There, in his astonishment, he found what he was looking for. And made some pictures for you. You should notice that such tags are put in the direction opposite to the restaurant, so they are difficult to been spotted unless if you are looking for them...

There is a dark legend behind these labels. Someone high in CERN management told Mikaela that there exists a hidden database where these "trees ID" are stored. For some unknown purpose. Everything here is identified, labeled and classified. Even the trees. And you.

After that discovery, he noticed something more... disturbing. Some of Maikel's gossip contacts sent him the following pictures, made somewhere at CERN as well:

These labels were strategically positioned... at the water dispensers at the same Restaurant 1. They keep waiting for some sleepy PhD who will press them by mistake. Luckily, it seems that nobody have yet pressed them... but... someone will eventually do... and then... WHAHAHAHAHAA!!!


PD: no need to panic, it seems evident that the CERN summer students have a nice sense of humor have just found a label marker. And some anti-matter. And some hatred for this corrupted world that must be destroyed! WHAHAHAHAHA!!

One petaelectronvolt of energy!!!!!!!!!!

This was my expression today when reading these news

Links to the news and paper here:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/icecube-neutrinos-came-from-outer-space.html
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1304.5356v1.pdf

More than 1 petaelectronvolt!!! 1 PeV!!!! If you don't know what are we talking about, there are some energy scales in the wikipedia.

So, the energy of one of these particles detected is the equivalent to a 1 megaton nuclear bomb explosion or also all the electricity consumption of the country of Greenland in one year... All that in only one tiny particle that is almost massless!!!

Of course, if you really checked that page, like my friend Edu, you will notice that I exaggerated "just a little bit" :D That page is in Joules, not eV :) Then, if you multiply per 10^-19 then you get the correct figures. So, we better don't start hypothesizing yet about how we could use these to produce electricity :D Or weapons to conquer the world and all that :P That particle, without almost any mass at all, with a petaelectronvolt of energy had only the energy of around 1000 mosquitoes splashing against your car windshield at a time! I wonder if they would break it...

And remember that our beloved LHC hadron collider at CERN reached so far "only" the energy of 8 TeV!! That is the highest energy ever achieved by mankind when producing particles, and these guys just detected from the sky have around thousand times more! You can think of all that people that was scared about the CERN creating black holes and destroying the world, creating particles of "only" a maximum of few TeV... while we are getting from the sky particles of petaelectronvolts!!!! It's like people scared of the danger for our eyes having too much light if we light a little candle, while they are outside at the sun :D

Ok, it's still much less than the famous Oh-My-God particle (yes, that exists, I did not make up that name!!! :D) which had almost a zettaelectronvolt of energy :D That is about equivalent to a 142 g baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour! (not the world energy consumption, if you also misread the wikipedia table as I did :D ). But it is just a little elementary particle! And scientists don't know yet what created such kind of super-energetic particles, although there are, of course, hypothesis... Science is way cool.

New safety sign at CERN!!!

 The CMS detector system administrator have made public today this new sign. It has been found at the P5 CMS experiment site. No previous warning or information from CERN safety team was made before. I guess they believed the sign was quite specific :D

The sysadmins are now crossing emails discussing about it and about its implications. One of the real emails being sent around says:

"Have we got icinga checks for the coffee machines ? To check water
pressure, coffee level etc etc..."

So there might be already plans for an important monitoring of the coffee conditions.

This is not really an issue to joke about, as we all know the importance of the coffee supplies at the CERN control rooms. Real eLog entries sent around by the detector shift crew in critical data taking conditions are of the kind of (yes, some were so hilarious that I saved the emails :D)

• 30 August 2011 12:20 : No sandwiches +Coffee machine down: 

  Situation getting critical.

• 28 July 2011 23:14 : Owl shift Jul 28-29

• ps: RFMs: PLEASE make sure there is enough water, coffee,

  cups, and particularly sugar, this is part of your

   responsibility and paramount to shift morale!!!!!

•  24 July 2011 06:00 : COFFEE CARD left with only 13 coffees

  Please refill it in order to keep a very high efficiency

  of the shift crew

•  20 July 2011 23:16 : AND THERE IS NO COFFEE CARD

  see subject. Riots/Strike to be expected in near future.

• 19 November 2010 21:19 :
  

  HELP! the night is going to be very long....
  our coffee card is gone missing after 20:00 and 
  we are left with a few capsules of "caffe espresso leggero"!
  Please take it back.

There is no word in elvish, entish, or the tongues of men for what i want to say

That quote from TreeBeard, from Lord of The Ring, is the first thing that came to my mind when I arrived to CERN this week. Along with the images of the deforestation and the enraged march of the Ents that followed that feeling.

It is true that there was some advertisement. We all received the CERN email announcement about that. But, as usual, we just discarded it as junk email or ignored it, thinking that it would be some standard piece of useless information that we don't need.

Then, suddenly, one day you arrive back to work and see that almost all CERN trees have disappeared. This place, that in arcane eras was a legendary piece of old ugly buildings surrounded by old huge trees, it is converted into just the bunch of old and even uglier structures.

Before, our eyes could still afford the pain, as the wonderful trees managed to hide most of the ugly buildings. But now they cannot stop bleeding in pain, after seeing the reality. Yes, CERN is even more ugly now :D

Ok, I exaggerated a little bit, the previous pictures are not actual pictures of CERN :D I leave you here few real pics I did:

PD: my apologies, this was meant to be posted past week but I forgot to click 'post' and my 3 seconds fish memory took care of me forgetting about that forever :D

CERN Project: Blowjob

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Discovery of the Maikel boson!!!

Oops, I just noticed that I never published this post, I'm very sorry!!!

There was so much excitation during these days of the Maikel boson discovery that I could not cope with that :D

I don't remember what I was meant to say but I put here some representative slides of the event. First one is one of the typical ATLAS slides, with very professional nice contrasting colors (sorry if watching them just made your eyes to bleed of pain) and their typical clear and professional Comic Sans font, that makes you feel like if you were reading a fun magazine rather than one of the most important science achievements of all time. Well, I will dedicate a main article only to comic sans so I will just comment about their nice result of 5.0 sigma significance!!

The second slide is a typical slide from the competing experiment, CMS, with nothing major to mock about and getting a similar result, taking into account that used totally different detector, software and people, so it is a good cross check. Worth to notice that the CMS result shown is a combination of all possible Higgs decay channels while the ATLAS one was just combining their best ones, so you cannot really compare both results.

 Finally I will just show a picture of how did probably Higgs feel during the presentation :) Actually, he was crying of emotion several times...

Exciting times at CERN!!! But, as CERN Director General said, we are not yet sure that this is the Higgs Boson predicted by our quantum physics theory (called Standard Model) but if it is not, it should be its twin brother, because it looks pretty much the same :)

Also, I want to make clear what does that 5.0 significance number means. I will show it with this nice picture that someone sent around :)

The way this works is: we find lots of particles decaying in different ways, and we expect a lot of noise coming from similar particles decaying in similar ways. Then we make simulation models to predict how many particles we would see in case we really had Higgs boson and in case we did not, and then we compare with what we detected. 5.0 significance just means that we found many more decay result particles than in case that Higgs boson did not existed, in the way that we are mathematically 99.999% sure that such extra particles are not just a lucky coincidence (called technically: 'statistical fluctuation').

And now many people would say "yeah, but I don't give a shit; that seems totally useless and a waste of money", similar to what many people said regarding electricity, lasers, microwaves, nuclear energy and so on (when the theories related to these were discovered). Imagine!! Scientists are just starting now to imagine new inventions that will come soon from knowing the correct equations of the quantum mechanics!!! I am not an expert on that topic but if the Higgs boson is the responsible of giving mass, will be able in the future to remove or add mass to stuff?? Space travel? Waste reduction? Loosing weight so getting slimmer and sexy in no time? Well, I guess not anytime soon, but surely we will find lots of indirect uses!! Also, when Einstein proved the photoelectric effect, he probably could not imagine that it would be used in the future for solar panels, opening the door of the elevator or flush the men's toilet in public bathrooms...

Higgs (or similar) discovery inminent!!!

Nobody can stop the gossip. It's one of the strongest forces of the universe (even stronger than gravity, electroweak and nuclear strong forces...). By now, most people has already known by any possible non official source that CERN will make a big announcment tomorrow.

CERN created a facebook event page where they announced the special meeting they will have tomorrow morning at 9am about an "update on the search of the Higgs bosson".

Many blogs, as explained in my previous post, leaked (or invented!!) a lot of details of what CERN will show. Lots of international newspapers, including the New York Times, also spread the news, even citing these unofficial blogs as the main source of information, at the same time as CERN official word is to not to believe anything they say.

Also, Fermilab already warmed up making an emergency press conference to show their results first!!!

And the Director General of the most important R&D public agency in Spain sent this announcement claiming that CERN already found Higgs!!!

Anyway most of us know the real truth. They will just say the typical technical details of  "we have found an excess of data over noise of so many blah blah standard deviations that could be compatible with the existence of the Higgs boson with a confidence level of blah blah but could also be this or could also be that other particle and we need more data to understand exactly such excess."

In any case, as you can imagine, there are tons of people gathering at CERN already, like moths going to a lamp at night.

You can see in this post the photo of the first person already sleeping there in front of the door of the auditorium where the conference will start tomorrow at 9am :D You can even see still sunlight outside so this person started picking up a place long time ago!! Actually the CERN DG already said by email to all employees here that they will open the doors of the auditorium only at 7h30, not before, so they prevent people for starting going tonight to sleep inside :D

We expect lots and lots of people going tomorrow there. The opening of the doors of the auditorium probably will be much worst that the opening of a shopping center the first day of sales. Prepare for the worst!!!

And of course, I also expect to be there!!! But  I doubt I will get a place!!! :P

As someone said in the official CERN event... OH MY GOD PARTICLE!!!