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While I was there I noticed that the CERN neutrino beam went right down the main street of the nearby town of St. Genis in France and on into the Jura Mountains. I wonder if the townspeople in St. Genis would feel comfortable knowing they were being irradiated, even if they understood the particles wouldn't interact.

You see, while the detector that's the subject of this story detects neutrinos of cosmic origin, you can also make them artificially, and with controlled energies and other desirable characteristics, by shooting a high energy particle beam into one end of a long pile of dirt.

The particles shower but are then absorbed by the dirt - except for the neutrinos produced by the showers. Enough dirt, and whatever comes out the other end is pretty much pure neutrino beam.

If you put in an intermediate amount of shielding, you get a mix of muons and neutrinos.

The way you detect these artificial particle beams is typically with packs filled with photographic film sealed in a dark chamber. Just beam it for a while and every zillionth particle will leave a little speck on some of the film.

Ever heard of neutrino oscillations? They proposed the theory to explain the lack of expected neutrino flux in one of the earlier underground neutrino detectors. It takes 10,000 years for heat from the center of the Sun to convect to the surface before it can shine directly on the earth, but neutrinos radiate from the core to the earth in 8 minutes because they don't interact.

Only problem is, we weren't getting many neutrinos. The first suspicion was that the Sun had begun to die but the cooling part of the interior hadn't reach the surface yet - that is, we hadn't visibly received the bad news but had found out ahead of time with the neutrino detector.

If neutrinos change identities into types that a given sensor is not sensitive to, though, it would explain this. But for this to be the case, the neutrino would have to have a very small, but non-zero mass. It's been the work of decades to try to measure this mass.

In the particle beam at CERN they would measure the neutrino flux at different points along the beam to see if they got more and less intense as they oscillated between electron, muon and tau neutrinos.

Enjoy!

Mike

While I was there I noticed that the CERN neutrino beam went right down the main street of the nearby town of St. Genis in France and on into the Jura Mountains. I wonder if the townspeople in St. Genis would feel comfortable knowing they were being irradiated, even if they understood the particles wouldn't interact.

You see, while the detector that's the subject of this story detects neutrinos of cosmic origin, you can also make them artificially, and with controlled energies and other desirable characteristics, by shooting a high energy particle beam into one end of a long pile of dirt.

The particles shower but are then absorbed by the dirt - except for the neutrinos produced by the showers. Enough dirt, and whatever comes out the other end is pretty much pure neutrino beam.

If you put in an intermediate amount of shielding, you get a mix of muons and neutrinos.

The way you detect these artificial particle beams is typically with packs filled with photographic film sealed in a dark chamber. Just beam it for a while and every zillionth particle will leave a little speck on some of the film.

Ever heard of neutrino oscillations? They proposed the theory to explain the lack of expected neutrino flux in one of the earlier underground neutrino detectors. It takes 10,000 years for heat from the center of the Sun to convect to the surface before it can shine directly on the earth, but neutrinos radiate from the core to the earth in 8 minutes because they don't interact.

Only problem is, we weren't getting many neutrinos. The first suspicion was that the Sun had begun to die but the cooling part of the interior hadn't reach the surface yet - that is, we hadn't visibly received the bad news but had found out ahead of time with the neutrino detector.

If neutrinos change identities into types that a given sensor is not sensitive to, though, it would explain this. But for this to be the case, the neutrino would have to have a very small, but non-zero mass. It's been the work of decades to try to measure this mass.

In the particle beam at CERN they would measure the neutrino flux at different points along the beam to see if they got more and less intense as they oscillated between electron, muon and tau neutrinos.

Enjoy!

Mike

... is The LaTeX Web Companion (ISBN 0201433117) by Michel Goosens and Sebastian Rahtz.

I'm not sure, but I think only citizens of CERN member states can be CERN staff members, and the U.S. is not a member state, but many american universities participate in CERN experiments and so you can go as a staff member of an american university - I did, as an undergraduate student, I did my senior thesis work at UC Santa Cruz at CERN this way.

Physicists have some strange ideas about what constitutes good software practice though. I try to politely correct this in this paper which I wrote for my experiment at CERN, proposing we scrap our FORTRAN codebase and rewrite it in C++.

Geneva's a little expensive to live in but if you work at CERN you can live in either france or Switzerland. (The particles have to show their passports twice each time around the accellerator ring as it crosses the border). I lived in France and found it very affordable.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I've never heard of that. But Turing's Teatise on the Enigma was declassified a few years ago by the NSA. An introduction and history of that book is available at the Turing site. That same site has a bibliography, and yet still no mention of material still classified.

That is not any proof that there still isn't classified material. When someone at the US National Archives sent me a copy of Turing's Treatise in 1997, that was a surprise. But while there might still be some undiscovered work by Turing. I'd be surprised if there is anything still classified.

There is some interesting stuff here. I don't know if it's what you're talking about, but worthwhile looking at nonetheless.

If you go back about 5 years or so, the World Wide Web Consortium's logo consisted of three stacked green W's in what looks like the Optima font. They were green because Robert Cailliau, some guy at CERN, is synaesthetic as well -- he sees different colors for different letters, and all his W's are green. He's even got a full-color alphabet there.
--

Hiya,

Not a usual poster on slashdot, but it seems that few/none of the other Higgs searchers at LEP are sticking their necks up. For the benefit of non-Higgs searchers in particle physics, and for those willing to wade through some details, here's a Higgs searcher's perspective on the story.

Unfortunately, the majority of the information presented on this has been to the public session of what is essentially an internal meeting of LEP. What the experiments (and the LEP Higgs group) have shown in their brief presentations are summaries of much more detailed work which is of course still ongoing (data taking only finished a few days ago).

The comments that I've seen in this forum from physicists are coming from what could be termed either the general community, or the competition. They reasonably point out that brief status reports of ongoing analyses have not convinced *them* that the Higgs is there, but unfortunately this was the structure of the forum in which the results were presented. Another interpretation is that we didn't properly anticipate confusion about issues that seemed obvious to the experts.

One common misinterpretation seems to be that LEP observes only 3-4 Higgs candidates, which is actually very false. This is just the number of events collected that really 'stood up' as extremely signal-like. In fact, hundreds of possible Higgs candidates were collected, and they are each given a rating on a "signal-like" scale. If you skim off the top few, you get four events, three from Aleph and one from L3. Up until very recently, Delphi also had one, but it dropped down on the signal scale after reanalysis.

As you drop down on the scale, to the point where you'd expect half of your events to be background and half to be signal, you expect 7 from background, and observe 14. The weight distribution agrees across the board with the signal distribution. These are divided among all four experiments and all search topologies. In fact, the sample was divided in several different ways for consistency checking purposes, and they all came out looking exactly like a Higgs signal. It gave us goosebumps to see the results of these tests.

If there's no signal, we've had a one in a thousand blip. There is a standard for discovery which requires that to be a bit less than one in a million. We are confident that, if it's real, we'd be able to reach that one in a million, and if it's not, that the effect would dry up. The whole point is that this is an exciting observation which we'd like to verify that is at the edge of our sensitivity. To do that properly would take six months of extra running, which all of the LEP experiments requested. The whole point is that it's not yet conclusive. The CERN management has been weighing questions of cost of running (in dollars and delay of future projects) vs chance that we did just get a freaky blip in the background, and has unfortunately decided not to take the risk. People will have the next 6-7 years to wonder if what we saw was real or not before it can be tested again.

At the moment, the most complete information is at the Physics Co-ordinator's Page.

A collection of all of the presentations at the public sessions of the LEPC meetings can be found here.

Cheers,
Pete McNamara

Hiya,

Not a usual poster on slashdot, but it seems that few/none of the other Higgs searchers at LEP are sticking their necks up. For the benefit of non-Higgs searchers in particle physics, and for those willing to wade through some details, here's a Higgs searcher's perspective on the story.

Unfortunately, the majority of the information presented on this has been to the public session of what is essentially an internal meeting of LEP. What the experiments (and the LEP Higgs group) have shown in their brief presentations are summaries of much more detailed work which is of course still ongoing (data taking only finished a few days ago).

The comments that I've seen in this forum from physicists are coming from what could be termed either the general community, or the competition. They reasonably point out that brief status reports of ongoing analyses have not convinced *them* that the Higgs is there, but unfortunately this was the structure of the forum in which the results were presented. Another interpretation is that we didn't properly anticipate confusion about issues that seemed obvious to the experts.

One common misinterpretation seems to be that LEP observes only 3-4 Higgs candidates, which is actually very false. This is just the number of events collected that really 'stood up' as extremely signal-like. In fact, hundreds of possible Higgs candidates were collected, and they are each given a rating on a "signal-like" scale. If you skim off the top few, you get four events, three from Aleph and one from L3. Up until very recently, Delphi also had one, but it dropped down on the signal scale after reanalysis.

As you drop down on the scale, to the point where you'd expect half of your events to be background and half to be signal, you expect 7 from background, and observe 14. The weight distribution agrees across the board with the signal distribution. These are divided among all four experiments and all search topologies. In fact, the sample was divided in several different ways for consistency checking purposes, and they all came out looking exactly like a Higgs signal. It gave us goosebumps to see the results of these tests.

If there's no signal, we've had a one in a thousand blip. There is a standard for discovery which requires that to be a bit less than one in a million. We are confident that, if it's real, we'd be able to reach that one in a million, and if it's not, that the effect would dry up. The whole point is that this is an exciting observation which we'd like to verify that is at the edge of our sensitivity. To do that properly would take six months of extra running, which all of the LEP experiments requested. The whole point is that it's not yet conclusive. The CERN management has been weighing questions of cost of running (in dollars and delay of future projects) vs chance that we did just get a freaky blip in the background, and has unfortunately decided not to take the risk. People will have the next 6-7 years to wonder if what we saw was real or not before it can be tested again.

At the moment, the most complete information is at the Physics Co-ordinator's Page.

A collection of all of the presentations at the public sessions of the LEPC meetings can be found here.

Cheers,
Pete McNamara

For some more (but brief) information about the Higgs boson read here

Some comments:

The collider has been used to confirm the existence of the Higgs particle unsuccessfully.

Maybe some of you wonder why these guys can't tell if they found the Higgs particle or not. Let me try to explain. It's all about statistics. Imagine you have two dices, one has the numbers from one to six on it. The other one you just know it has the numbers one to five and the last number can be any of 1 to 6, there might be e.g. another 2 or something. let's call this dice 'signal dice'. Unfortunately they look exactly the same and you can only read the number on top.

The Higgs is like the number 6 on the second dice.

ok. roll the dices. you get 3 and 5. Now you know there is at least a 3 or a 5 on the signal dice. Noone cares. again: 1 and 6. Wow.. do we have something? You don't know because you cannot tell which dice shows the 6.

The trick: if you roll a hundert times, you expect 100 * 2 (dices) / 6 = 33.3 times the number 6 if the 'signal dice' has a 6 and only 100 * 1 / 6 = 16 times 6 if the signal dice has no 6.

You see, a single (or a few) rolles don't help. Even if you see the 6, it might be the other dice. Unfortunately they cut the power to LEP so they cannot keep on rolling.

Actually only Aleph has 3.5 sigma excess in one channel Z*->H Z (H -> b + anti b), so that means pretty much nothing and they don't really trust their Monte Carlo (which provides the second dice :). That means they see something, but just have not enough data to really confirm the existence. NOrmally you do that with at leat 5 sigma.

According to commentators, whoever finds the Higgs first will probably win a Nobel Prize.

Let a lower powered accelerator attempt to find the Higgs, I STILL don't believe it will be discovered, because it's been stated over and over 'we just need a little more power to find the Higgs boson!'. The problem is that all of these vast teams are lead by one or two scientists, who desperately want the Nobel Prize. Hence, good science is sometimes ignored in favor of the limelight... I'm just glad 'good physics' prevailed this time around.

I had hoped to talk about this on BottomQuark but lost all my research midway through the discussion. whoops. `8r) I wonder if there is such a thing as an amateur partical physics person....

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Let a lower powered accelerator attempt to find the Higgs, I STILL don't believe it will be discovered, because it's been stated over and over 'we just need a little more power to find the Higgs boson!'. The problem is that all of these vast teams are lead by one or two scientists, who desperately want the Nobel Prize. Hence, good science is sometimes ignored in favor of the limelight... I'm just glad 'good physics' prevailed this time around.

I had hoped to talk about this on BottomQuark but lost all my research midway through the discussion. whoops. `8r) I wonder if there is such a thing as an amateur partical physics person....

--
Gonzo Granzeau

When they say "Aleph" or "Delphi" they really mean a collaboration of several hundred scientists from many different universities each (e.g. Delphi = 550 physicists from 56 universities). They operate the "Aleph" or "Delphi" Detectors (which have approx. the size of a gym).

You can easily spot HEP papers by looking for those that have author lists of two pages.
No wonder they had to invent WWW to communicate!

A list of all CERN groups/experiments. Visit their homepages; they have some nice pictures and explanations.

Not true - CERN is neither responsible for GriPhyN (which is an NSF project), nor the invention of the data grid concept. The experiments at CERN (and other places) "merely" drive the need for something like GriPhyN.

That said, there is a European project similar in scope to GriPhyN, which CERN is a part of: the DataGrid Project.

For a book about Grids, you can look for "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure", edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. Both are on the GriPhyN project: Dr. Foster is a principle investigator on GriPhyN, and Dr. Kesselman is one of the Senior Personnel.

And yes, it'll run on Linux (at CERN anyway, they're quickly getting rid of all the "legacy RISC" platforms here)

It's not really about having fast pipes all over Europe, it's more like having software you can run to have your applications running on thousands of nodes around the world and also managing all of it.

Actually, despite the "science-fictioness" of the patent, the gentleman who submitted it appears to know what he is doing.
He even works at Cern on the largest particle accelerator/collider in the world on a project involving crashing electrons and positrons into each other at very high speed and seeing what happens. Cool stuff. Off topic, but cool nonetheless.
Still, the patent itself may be a joke.

Going on means going far

Actually, despite the "science-fictioness" of the patent, the gentleman who submitted it appears to know what he is doing.
He even works at Cern on the largest particle accelerator/collider in the world on a project involving crashing electrons and positrons into each other at very high speed and seeing what happens. Cool stuff. Off topic, but cool nonetheless.
Still, the patent itself may be a joke.

Going on means going far

Actually, despite the "science-fictioness" of the patent, the gentleman who submitted it appears to know what he is doing.
He even works at Cern on the largest particle accelerator/collider in the world on a project involving crashing electrons and positrons into each other at very high speed and seeing what happens. Cool stuff. Off topic, but cool nonetheless.
Still, the patent itself may be a joke.

Going on means going far

Actually, despite the "science-fictioness" of the patent, the gentleman who submitted it appears to know what he is doing.
He even works at Cern on the largest particle accelerator/collider in the world on a project involving crashing electrons and positrons into each other at very high speed and seeing what happens. Cool stuff. Off topic, but cool nonetheless.
Still, the patent itself may be a joke.

Going on means going far

The presentation of the Higgs working group is Here. If I understand correctly they're claiming to see three sigma results at the aleph detector, which is certainly good enough to announce a possible discovery, particularly when confirmed by similar results from the other 3 detectors at LEP. The people who are claiming that this is only a political annoucement to try to extend the life of LEP don't know what they're talking about.

--Bob

The fact of the matter that it is very easy to get statistical fluctuations of this magnatude in high-energy physics. (insert obligatory comment about the accuracy of political "polls" here) And in the higgs search at CERN they have frequently seen extra events just at the end of their range. (The mass of 114.9 GeV is barely within the range of the accelerator to see at its current energy)

If the higgs exists, it will be found by the LHC. It's enticing to think it's barely beyond LEP's reach, and if the LHC finds it there, the LEP people will bemoan not being able to extend LEP's run just a little bit longer...

Disclaimer: IAP (I Am a Physicist), and have worked on the higgs analysis at CERN (but do not currently). How come more physics people don't post to slashdot? I know you guys read it. ;)

--Bob

The news coverage seems to be based on the talks that the four LEP experiments gave earlier this week at CERN. If you're interested in the physics behind the press reports, here's a link to the summary talk. You can also hunt around the CERN Experiments web site; click on Aleph, Delphi, L3, and Opal.

I read through the summary presentation -- I think the evidence for a Higgs is not very compelling. The signal (albeit a ~ 4 sigma signal) comes solely from the 4-jet channel in the Aleph experiment. I'd be much more interested in seeing the result in a refereed journal, however. At any rate, you can read the talk and judge for yourself.

Disclaimer: while I am a physics grad student (well, for another month, anyway), Higgs searches are not my realm of expertise.

The news coverage seems to be based on the talks that the four LEP experiments gave earlier this week at CERN. If you're interested in the physics behind the press reports, here's a link to the summary talk. You can also hunt around the CERN Experiments web site; click on Aleph, Delphi, L3, and Opal.

I read through the summary presentation -- I think the evidence for a Higgs is not very compelling. The signal (albeit a ~ 4 sigma signal) comes solely from the 4-jet channel in the Aleph experiment. I'd be much more interested in seeing the result in a refereed journal, however. At any rate, you can read the talk and judge for yourself.

Disclaimer: while I am a physics grad student (well, for another month, anyway), Higgs searches are not my realm of expertise.

...proton and anti-proton in the up-coming LHC...

The LHC is a proton-proton collider. This will be acheived by having two rings that cross each other in four places. Everything else you've said is correct. (If you're interested, I'm working on my M.Sc. in Particle Physics, and I'm currently at CERN to do it. I'm working on a piece of ATLAS, which is a detector that will be used on the LHC. If anyone has further questions, feel free to use my e-mail address...

As far as I know (I am a student in CS at the ETH in Zurich and my Physics prof works at the Cern) the LEP is shutdown because it is being replaced by a new collider, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in the next few years. Browseing through my notes I found a little chart.

Beams Energy Luminosity
LEPe+ e- 200 GeV10^32cm^-2 s^-1
LHCp p 14 TeV10^34
Pb Pb1312 TeV10^27


So in the end, the new Large Hadron Collider can accelerate those little bugger's up to much higher energies, thus probably alloweing other new particles to be observed (or confirmed) Oh and by the way, the Cern's at www.cern.ch See ya

If this doesn't fit the bill, I really think the possibility of an Ingres-related application fitting your requirements is pretty high. Ingres was widely available in the academic/university community, supported remote connections from Unix, and almost certainly sported at least one X-based app.

we've expended tremendous effort doing things like [...] fixing memory bugs

What -- in C? Now that's new to me. The C projects I've been involved with rarely had any problems with memory management. Now with C++ finding them is a major industry (just think of Purify++).

Does the project you mention have many programmers grown up with C++ or even Java, and few C old-timers? I'm pretty much worried about our current C++ project because it seems to me that I'm actually the only one who understands dynamic memory allocation (sort of; what the ROOT package does is really beyond me). I attribute this knowledge to C.

And don't get me started about Java. Someone who learned Java as his/her first programming language is likely to have immense trouble switching "back" to C++ (or even C). It seems a bit like switching to stick shift after 10yrs automatic...

That said, I think Java is actually a nice lil' language to start with... if you don't need to go "back" to C/C++.

See here for details. There's a NeXT cube in a glass case in a foyer at CERN, with a sign on it reading "World's first web server, 1992".

From the little information I have, CERN was started about 1976. Work On ARPANET began in the 60's, and in 1970, the first publication of the Host to Host protocol was published. Later, that year, there was the "[f]irst cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. This line is later replaced by another between BBN and RAND. A second line is added between MIT and Utah" (Hobbes' Internet Timeline). According to this, CERNET was around in 1976ish. In 1971, ARPANET had 15 node and 23 hosts. The WWW is only a subset of the internet. While I can't disprove the CERN claim of WWW, I do know WWW did not take off until you had browsers. That is all I know, and I admit it isn't much.

Particle physics is really simple once you can get past the part where everything is made of smaller pieces. If you want to read something that completely blows the Standard Model out of the water, then you should read the book Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku It is about theoretical physics and talks about really cool stuff like higher dimensions wormholes, and relativity.

If you just want to stick to particle physics then you can check out CERN

Well, the guy (A graduate of Oxford University) at cern (Nuclear physics reseach lab) who invented web definetly had gone through "navigate through channels and bureaucracy and kiss all the right butts." -University...

The one that was competing with doxygen was Doc++. Has anyone had any good or bad experience with it ? What about CERN's Root tool ?

I'm leaning toward doxygen just because Mozilla is using it. While I care much more about other aspects of documentation besides class diagrams, check out this huge graph generated by doxygen on mozilla.

On one project I worked on we went the other way -- from documentation to code -- using a big FrameMaker document and tool that would convert all the tables into C struct definitions, and generate an interface library. While I think closely linking the code and the documentation is critical (preferably generating the documents in the build process, so they are never out of date) the code to document strategy seems much more flexible.

There are many phenomenons in space (like the supernova) that're either difficult or simply impossible, with today's technology, to recreate

Good, the idea of some guy in a lab recreating a supernova is not my idea of fun, what they do at CERN is good enough.

The Gojira Dispatch
The World of Abstinence is chock full o' knowledge mavens like our Gojira!

explanation in Engilish:
This site's purpose is promotion of friendship between Japan and the other countries .I want to help friendship between Japanese and the others, and beside I want everyone to know Japanese language and Japanese culture. N.B
* This is a private site.
* I can't understand languages except Japanese and English.
* This site prohibits entries and advirtisements about all of adult sites and business sites.

A színházak már a virágzó korszak elején ellenségesen fogadták a mozit. 1908-ban született az a fõkapitányi rendelet, mely szerint tilos mozira és kabaréra a színház szó használata, mert a közönséget megtévesztheti, bár ezt a gyakorlatban nem nagyon tartották be.

Visit these pages to know more about Mozilla's lifestyle:
Mozilla, your pal
Mozilla, the scientist
Mozilla, the explorer

Accelerator physicists don't "assume" the particles go at about the speed of light. If they went at any speed that wasn't immeasurably close to c, the accelerators wouldn't work. The things these people accomplish never ceases to amaze me. Go to any website like http://www.cern.ch and take a look at what's going on.

Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).

In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.

I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.

And I taught myself programming because I was too sick to continue school and eventually started my own software consulting company

You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.

I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.

Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.

Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.

(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind

Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.

But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.

I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).

One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.

Michael D. Crawford

This is more likely to be a serious attempt than a hack.

Due to Slashdot's odd rating method. You probably aren't reading this.

Well, let's just wait for good implementations of valarray and slice... Is not it what you want?

That's the fun part -- lots of house-sized detectors! The quark-gluon plasma expands and cools (actually "hadronizes", collapses back into more ordinary particles) long before they are detected. This means that you need to analyze the particles that come out of the explosion and determine from their properties whether they were created in an ordinary collision or whether a QGP was formed.

As far as the actual detectors go, there are a variety of options -- from scintillation detectors that detect tiny flashes of light when a particle travels through a plastic paddle, to Cerenkov detectors that detect rings of light that form when a particle travels faster than the speed of light in the detector's medium, to time-projection chambers that use the particles' ability to ionize gas to create a 3D "CCD image" of the trajectories. Each detector type has its own advantages and disadvantages, and in the experiments at CERN and RHIC a variety of detectors are wrapped around the collision points. Check out NA49 and PHENIX for two experiments that I've worked on in the past few years (although I'm a software engineer now).

I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)

In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.

I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.

If you are interested in neutrinos, there's quite a lot going on. Check:
Fermilab's MINOS;
CERN's NGS;
more in general, a page on Neutrino oscillation

Please go and check the official web pages: A New State of Matter

It's really called the Large Hadron Collider. It's called that because it's large and it collides hadrons.

The Higgs particle (if it exists) would be a very important step in determining what exactly gives particles mass. If photons and electrons are both just ethereal packets of probability waves, why does the electron have mass, and therefore inertia?
Start Here.
And then, try this other link.

3D Visualization *is* used in many fields. For example, in HEP, CERN's ROOT can be run on cheap PCs with hardware acceleration.

There are also demonstration programs available on the web that demonstrate the various effects of relativity (length contraction, perceived light frequency=colour, optical aberation). I haven't got the URL offhand, but a serach in your favourite engine should do the trick.

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Dan

We met at Rice University about a year and a half ago. I was a student of Arkansas' residential high-school for mathematics and science (modelled after the Illinois school you helped create). Now I am at CERN searching for the Higgs Boson... The `God Particle' as you called it. I think a great deal about how research and education are carried out today and the great possibilities that technology has brought us. I know that a great deal of the slashdot readers are strong proponents for a movement in the software industry called the `open source' movement. The fundamental principle behind this movement is a freedom of information. I am curious what room science can make for such a movement. Do you foresee a way in which research can move to an open source paradigm while retaining the stringent process of peer review? Do you foresee any novel ways that we can use today's current technology to combine research and education?

Kyle Cranmer

We met at Rice University about a year and a half ago. I was a student of Arkansas' residential high-school for mathematics and science (modelled after the Illinois school you helped create). Now I am at CERN searching for the Higgs Boson... The `God Particle' as you called it. I think a great deal about how research and education are carried out today and the great possibilities that technology has brought us. I know that a great deal of the slashdot readers are strong proponents for a movement in the software industry called the `open source' movement. The fundamental principle behind this movement is a freedom of information. I am curious what room science can make for such a movement. Do you foresee a way in which research can move to an open source paradigm while retaining the stringent process of peer review? Do you foresee any novel ways that we can use today's current technology to combine research and education?

Kyle Cranmer

• Beowulf is one of a family of parallel programming API tools. Programs must use the API to accomplish parallel programming.
• SCI is fast hardware with support for distributed shared memory, messaging, and data transfers. Again, if you don't use the API then no gain.
• DIPC is distributed System V IPC. Programs which use the IPC API can be converted to DIPC easily, such as just by adding the DIPC flag to the IPC call.
• MOSIX is the most general-purpose. Processes are scattered across a cluster automatically without having to modify the programs. No API needed other than usual Unix-level process use. Allows parallel execution of any program, although full use requires a parallel program design.