Femtobarn party at CERN!!! Toilets will get fixed!!

Official CERN news:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR06.11E.html

CERN's LHC accelerator has now delivered so much data that both CMS and Atlas detectors have already recorded over 1 inverse femtobarn of data!!! (equivalent to 70 millions of millions of collisions, for the people who likes millions). And yes, in case you didn't notice that is a lot. For comparison, in all the years that Fermilab's Tevatron was working (currently second most powerful accelerator after CERN's one, and for many years the first one) it recorded just 8 inverse femtobarns (running since 1983). Now in only few months of continuous running, LHC did already 1. And expectations are to get from now about another 1 per month till reaching 5.5 this year (and then they will start doing other things, like superfluid liquid drops of heavy ions matter).

Maikel discovered that while he was in one of his interesting meetings close to the CMS control room. Suddenly the meeting finished and bottles of champaign and boxes of snacks started appearing from nowhere. People were bringing stuff and more stuff and soon there was a small improvised speech followed by people eating and drinking like crazy. Party!!!!!

Maikel's friends soon discovered it and felt envy about how lucky Maikel was. It's strange the fact that they even knew about it, as everybody knows that Maikel is very silent and quiet and never says anything...

Anyway, in a strange cosmical coincidence that some would correlate with this femtobarn party, suddenly all CERN toilets are getting fixed. Maikel was complaining since months ago about the radioactive toilet full of antimatter in front of his office (see this post) but since few weeks ago the situation got worst. The water just didn't come out when you desperately pushed the buttons and the radioactive products from CERN physicists stayed there under your impotent face. Soon the smell overpassed the human resistance capability and even Maikel was forced to run away and try to use other facilities. Then he discovered that other ones around the same building and other buildings were in the same disastrous situation. Somehow it seemed that CERN was able to crush all world records in high technology and femtobarns but it was unable to repair toilets!!

But now the situation is changing. People repairing toilets have been spreading around CERN and fixing stuff here and there. Maikel even got told that in the toilet in front of him 5 people fixing the toilet were seen this morning, discussing about the theoretical problems and deploying an experimental fix, which didn't work. Somehow 5 people were not enough to fix a toilet but we expect tomorrow the sun will shine and the toilet will get finally repaired, being able to accept antimatter again.

PD: note, tomorrow is Saturday so no luck
PD2: actually the weather forecast is quite crappy... XD

Maikel was not dead!! He was in Mars!!!

And here you have the certificate proving it!!!
http://marsparticipate.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/?action=getcert&hashid=8AA9B4832BF7299FF9640B10B8E97E70


Well, actually Maikel did not go in person, but his name will go!! What are you waiting for?? Send also your name there!! There is a deadline for it very soon!!!
http://marsparticipate.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/

This blog is dead

Unless somemaikel proves I am wrong

Internet troll spamming Spanish news sites about CERN's LHC

The Internet Troll has been found spamming internet news pages that were talking about CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Spanish. He was insulting the Spanish Prime Ministry rather than commenting about the news itself (typical Troll behavior...). Fortunately for us, the Internet Sheriff found him and banned his IP!!! XD

The complete article is in this link:
http://www.eljueves.es/2011/02/16/troll_internet%E2%80%A6_enfrenta_admin_mas_duro_del_lugar.html

Amazing how Spanish comic magazines and sites talk so much about our LHC, even for making fun of totally unrelated events :D

When everybody is Maikel, no one is...

Today we had an interesting and international discussion / debate about St.Valentine's day.

Maikel's got fed up of talking with some CERN-related couples and realizing that most don't like this day and say that it is better not celebrating St.Valentine's because "every day it's special", not just that specific day. When asked about what do they do any other day, he realized that most couples just celebrate their anniversary once a year (if anything).

Maikel's thoughts can be summarized in the following interesting sentence from the bad guy of The Incredibles : "when everyone's super, no one will be".

During the interesting discussion, there were different opinions: the general idea is that most people don't like all the merchandising and stuff that enterprises try to sell us this day, but apart from that, Maikel found:

• who just don't like St.Valentine's day at all
• who prefers to change it for some other day (May 1st, June 12nd...)
• who prefers to celebrate only the anniversary

And Maikel says... "celebrate as much as you can!!!"

PS: as someone pointed out, celebrate as much as you can, but not everyday!!! XD

PS2: and... vote in the poll!!!

CERN's LHC without competitor after 2011...

Not so funny as my usual news (and not invented, as usual). Actually I think they are sad news for science...

The second bigger and most powerful accelerator after CERN's LHC, the Tevatron of Fermilab, has officially declared that will close at the end of this year 2011:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/Special_Edition011011.html

Someone could imagine that they just close because we already discovered the Higgs and because they are not powerful enough as to make sheep-sheep collisions as us. Some other could argue that they close because they realize that CERN people is just more handsome. But the truth is most probably just other: money (we are in crisis, remember??)

Anyway, just the accelerator will close. They have many other experiments running that look promising. Let's hope for the best for our colleagues!!

Higgs boson finally discovered by CERN!!! And it is a sheep!!!!

Dr. Eleni (even before finishing her PhD) claimed the final discovery of Higgs boson at CERN, based in an impressive and innovative research work by Dr. Juan (see this reference, previously published in this same blog), which was motivated by the amazing and surprising discovery by Dr. Elena, with her photographic identification of the particle field.

As you can see in the figure 1 of the paper, in the middle of the phase space there is an object passing thorough (a car) inside the detector, specifically in the CERN roundabout close to entrance B. But that particle's movement is clearly slowed down by something. The so-called "sheep field", filling all the space in the picture, is getting attached to the particle, slowing down its movement in the same exact way as if the particle acquired mass. That is exactly the Higgs principle!!! Surprisingly, none of Dr. Juan and Dr. Elena noticed the effect.

We can also appreciate in figure 1 that the sheep field is composed of some kind of individual and indivisible quanta of so-called "sheep". In principle, CERN scientists could be able in a near future to separate bunches of such sheep and being able one day to isolate one of them, to study the properties of this sheep quanta, the Higgs boson.

The sheep, Higgs, were always there... just waiting for us to detect them... Finally we managed to do it. This is a great day... just a little step for a sheep, but a huge step for mankind!!