University Challenge

I was sitting half listening to University challenge and I could have sworn Jeremy Paxman tried to tell my that a photon was a baryon. Surely I must have been mistaken?

STFC cuts ILC funding

The STFC have cut UK funding into the ILC. ILC stands for International Linear Collider, it is going to be the next generation big partilce physics experiment, intended primarily, although not only, to precisely measure the properties of whatever the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) discovers.
With the STFC withdrawing all funding they have wasted all the U.K investment in this project, which must have been considerable, I know of several members of my department who were involved in it. In addition and perhaps more seriously, some smaller areas are being dropped altogether, solar-terrestrial for instance. This is a terrible blow for U.K science and gives lie to the prime-ministers statement that he wants the U.K to be a world leader in science.
It worries me that numbers of young people choosing to pursue physics, even to 'A' level have continually declined while interest in subjects which have little or no actual value has continually increased, now funding for the most fundamental of physics reasearch is being cut. This country is going to be short of highly educated numerate graduates, and have a surfeit of media studies graduates (let's face it, anything above 0 is frankly too many). Giving £5000 golden hello to attract a few more, probably not very good, physics graduates to the teaching profession is not going fix the damage that under-investment will cause.
Furthermore there are serious problems breewing with the STFC, which has managed to alienate many members of the physics community already. There have been complaints of a lack of dialogue with the scientific community and more seriously incompetence in allowing the £80m black hole to develop in the first place.
Further reading physicsworld, new scientist and interactions and a 10 Downing street petition is here.

Where's the bloody remote!!!

We often play with the idea of getting rid of the T.V particularly after visiting my relatives in France, who don't have T.Vs. We arrive home full of good intentions about limiting the amount of T.V we watch, but we quickly find ourselves returning to the old routine.
Well ,today we had a taste of what it would be like if we were to take the plunge. This morning the eldest child lost the T.V remote, after switching to childrens T.V (so at least we had the option of them watching during the day when they get to much)
The day was just awful, truly horrible, it turns out that it is us adults that rely on the T.V, to distract the kids while we are doing those neccessary weekend jobs like Sunday lunch, but also to distract ourselves when they have been to much and we are trying to recover in their quiet moments. We have freeview and normally when the little one naps, the big one has to amuse himself in his room for a short time, we drink tea and watch a Friends or Scrubs re-run. Without it we talk - about work. I feel like I can not relax. We have resorted to a film tonight, I can not cope with the idea of a whole evening without the television, I need the anaesthetic escape, especially today, I do not want to read or play chess or talk, I need to be entirely insular, vegetative, quiet, passive.
Today was a bad day for it to go, yesterday we spent in Ikea (yes the entire day) spent £300 on flooring and finishing touches for the house, and today, to keep on schedule, we had to work on the house. We are finishing the bathroom at the moment, my job was plastering the gash in the ceiling where the wall that separated the W.C was. His job was wiring in the new lights.
Added to this I have a deadline, which has already been extended twice, for the latest chapter of my thesis and the code which was running to make the plots...crashed, of course.
Add to this two almost hyperactive children and thanksgiving preparations and you have the worst possible day.
How I wish I could put this into perspective, but I can not, it is frightening to realise that I am totally dependent on the T.V

The future?

I have been thinking about my future a lot lately. I will soon come to the end of my PhD and that is as far as I had ever planned. I seem to have been following a plan, until now. I suppose I just assumed that I would love my PhD excel at it and continue on in Physics, but I decided against that months ago. I made the decision when I was pregnant though and when I returned to work I started to enjoy what I was doing again, and started looking for post-doc positions, but I am just not sure. When I think about what I do now, and consider continuing with it, but without the freedoms I have as a student, the thought is unbearable. I don't want to commute into an office everyday and share my space with uninspiring people. I don't want to be away from my family for most of the day, seeing them only for a few hours each evening , if at all. I don't want to travel all over the world, spending days or weeks away at a time. I don't want all my time accounted for so that I have no time to read and write, and experience things other than work. Most worryingly of all I don't want to do the work I have been doing in my PhD, I have not found it fulfilling enough to overide all the other problems.
I'm still trying to understand this, I still get a thrill when I learn new physics, when I go to talks and read books and research papers, but my day to day work, even the more exciting parts, I just can not be interested enough to want to spend anymore time doing it.
This blog has told me something too, I expected it to lean more towards physics and less towards my family, but it leans the other way, does that tell me where my interest lies at the moment?
So I need to think of something that I am interested in, that fits in well with family life and, hopefully, has something to do with physics. I have joined prospects and other career websites and I recently went to a recruitment fair. It was awful, truly, truly horrible, the people were all carbon copies of each other, speaking commitee speak, all trying to show they have the same 'skills set' of leadership, team playing blah blah, Oh my god how could I ever think that I could have anything to do with that world. The only people who didn't speak like that were the teachers, so we spent a long time at the teaching stand and I think we will do some taster sessions, both of us, my partner and I.
Then yesterday morning I woke up thinking that I couldn't do it. I was so promising as a physicist, and I still love it surely somewhere there is something I can do?
I need to check the Aber Uni website, I just can't make this decision, it is so hard. Maybe I need to speak to somebody, but who?

Fireworks and food

I have been working at home this week for several reasons; since my office mate moved to work in Paris I now share my office with some rather boring people(and one of them is a complete idiot), my younger son has been a bit poorly with a cold, and finally, I am writing, which I always prefer to do at home.
In the past it has not been very particularly sucessful, I find it hard to concentrate and don't really get much done, but this time it has been great. I doubt I will meet my deadline, but that is entirely due to other factors. I have spent more time with my children, I help with the house-work, and by that I mean real work, tiling the kitchen and bathroom and painting my youngest sons bedroom.
I think my favourite thing has been being able to help more with the cooking and eating together properly, without being rushed, as a family.
We have just started using our slow-cooker properly, it was a Christmas gift and when we first tried it we couldn't get it right, everything was too watery, but now we have really cracked it. The trick is to add very little liquid, so basically, ignore the instructions.
Our first success, last week, was a chicken, we just threw it in on a bed of stewing vegetable and added a scant cup of stock made with Marigold organic swiss boullion. It was so nice. I thicked the gravy with Bisto (a bit of a cheat that I always have in the cupboard, reminds me of when I was young) and there was plenty, much more than when you roast, but just as tasty. The only negative was the skin which doesn't crisp up. The next day was Guy Fawkes night and I had the cheapest stewing lamb in the fridge, so we decided on a hotpot, again in the slow-cooker. It was even better. I just browned the lamb and some onions in a frying pan, threw it in the pot and deglazed with the left over chicken gravy. A layer of sliced potatoes on the top and that was it. Again the top was not crisp, but I may try popping it under the grill next time (or using a blow-torch!).
We ate early, about 4 and then went to the fireworks at the pub down the road, HJ was really over-excited, and we let him have candy-floss, so he was really buzzing, but he saw some friends from school and played the planets game (where someone stands in the middle and he pretends to be each of the planets in order, spinning and running around you) so he ran off most of the sugar and flaked out as soon as we got home.
Today we are continuing the slow-cooker theme with slow cooked ragu Bolognese, by Delia Smith, with pork, beef and chicken livers, mmmmm. Partners brother and his wife are coming over so we are tryin the coolest sounding recipe from my sister too. It's simply a hollowed out pumpkin filled to a third with gruyere and topped up with cream (!!!!) and baked till the outside is black. I can't wait to try it. I'm following it with brioche and butter pudding, the brioche is baking now, I make it with a ready blended bag of dry ingredients I get from france.
After all that rich food we're planning fish for tomorrow, however, there is some chuck steak lurking in the freezer and plenty of red wine in the pantry...

Higgs in the blogsphere

In January a blogger, John Conway, who works on CDF at the Fermilabs Tevatron collider posted about a 2 sigma bump that may, or may not be the Higgs.
This is really interesting to me, not only because it may be the first observation of the Higgs, but because it was reported in the blogsphere. Most people still believe that scientific discoveries occur in a "Eureka" moment, but that is not the case. By sharing the story as a blog the method by which scientists arrive at the truth is also shared something that many people, among them the well educated, have no sense of whatsoever.
Another recent story which illustrates this point well is the story of Pentaquarks, which I have been part of in a very small way.
Pentaquarks particles made up of 4 quarks and and anti-quark, if this means nothing to you then think of them as like protons and neutrons but heavier, and not stable. they decay almost immediately into other particles. In the 60s people kept finding new particles and they were all classified as mesons (a quark and an anti-quark) or baryons (three quarks) but no other combinations were found. Which is odd, if you think of the elements, they are made by putting in more protons and electrons so Hydrogen is a proton with an electron, Helium is 2 protons, 2 neutrons and 2 electrons and so on. But the baryons and mesons just have 3 or 2 constituent particles. Furthermore, the underlying mathematical theory (QCD) of these composite particles, as we understand it at present, allows not only pentaquarks, but all kinds of other things, but so far we see no evidence of them.
Inspired by some new theoretical predictions the LEPS collaboration at SPring-8 in Japan looked for these pentaquarks and observed a small but statistically significant signal, they were closely followed by the DIANA collaboration and others. However some experiments looked and did not see any evidence for this new particle, and gradually, throughout 2005 the negatives overtook the positives. One particular experiment, which had seen the pentaquark signal looked again using more data specifically gathered to look for the pentaquark, but could not reproduce their earlier 5.5 and 7.8 sigma results.
It may look like the question is answered but this is not yet the case, DIANA published further evidence in 2006 for the pentaquark, althought this is the only recent positive evidence. It seems so incredibly unlikely that so many different experiments would see such similar (although in some cases not similar enough!) results and that it is a statistical fluctuation in each, but I am aware that there can be problems with reflections (seeing ghosts of other particles) in these particular cases, although I don't know the details, also, all the positives were small statistics experiments and it has been argued that the significance was overestimated.
A further important point is that even if it turns out that there is no narrow pentaquark it does not mean that the work done has no value, the pentaquark has reinvigorated the field of hadron spectroscopy and inspired new theoretical work into bonding between quarks in bound states to name just two important side-effects.
It illustrates well how science works, it is not a clear path to the truth followed by infallible, objective automatons. It also makes me quite pessimistic about the 2 sigma bumps seen by CDF, it seems to me they're in a good situation though, although there is excitement they have been careful enough and issued enough warnings that should it disappear with more statistics it will not look at all bad for them, and if it is something interesting and LHC then see something at the same mass then they will have seen the Higgs first.

France, Germany and back to France

My job would be so good for someone who loves travelling, unfortunately I don't particularly enjoy it, so this last month has been a bit hard. Having said that the trip to Paris proved to be really enjoyable. I had enough free time to look around and the meeting I was at was really interesting and I didn't have to worry about speaking myself.
The trip to Hamburg was quite the opposite. I was so busy I hardly got any time to myself, I had a talk to work on and I was really quite worried about it. It was the first talk I have given since maternity leave, and to make it even worse, the last time I went to give a talk I ended up in hospital (I was quite pregnant at the time)
Anyway it went ok, the first half was ok the second half was not so good, I underestimated my audience a bit, but there were some questions and some people seemed really interested. Anyway the whole trip really tireed me so I was really glad that we had planned a holiday immediately afterwards. In fact I had just 12 hours at home and we left to get the ferry to Boulogne.
We had planned to camp near Boulogne and drive to my brothers near Poitiers the next day. I know it sounds mad to camp in October, but we had a very good reason. We are planning a 9 month to a years holiday, where we are going to travel around the mediterranean and some of eastern europe, next year. So we need to know how much cold we can handle. So this was supposed to be our first rehearsal and it didn't go very well.
Things started to go a bit wrong when the ferry was an hour late so we arrived in Boulogne at 8 instead of 7, but we started off and found the campsite (despite K forgetting to bring the name or number for the campsite) we were pretty tired when we got there and the boys were quite whingy, also it was dark, really dark! The campsite looked really nice though and the couple were friendly so we paid and chose our pitch and went to put up the tent. We were really fast at putting up the tent, but the boys were getting really cross and the eldest was trying to help, we had nearly got it up after 10 minutes, the baby was really crying, I was cold and cross and the eldest was being a real pain in the ass. Anyway I went to get the pegs... they were not there :-( still we tried to manage with the 8 oegs we could find around the place trying to hammer them in with a stone (also forgot the hammer, baby flat out screaming by now) then came the blow up matress. Well we ran into 2 problems then, it was too big for the tent and we had no electricity to blow it up with anyway. So we gave up. We were incredibly cross and I was growling horribly at the eldest who was being a real pain becuase he doesn't like the sound of the youngest crying. It was really as bad as it could be. We drove back to Boulogne and stayed in an F1, which was 10 euros more than the campsite (who had reimbursed me!)
The rest of the hoiday was significantly better, walks and the zoo at Doue, the market, and seeing my brother I really love the Vienne, I think I would rather we move there than the south, it is so beautiful and sort of familiar, whereas the south looks so foreign.
We didn't even try to camp on the way back, maybe we should try the back garden first!!