Just for completeness and for those of you who haven’t seen it on my Facebook page or the Build-Your-Own-Particle-Detector web site, I managed to get hold of Peter Higgs (one of this year’s two Nobel Prize winners in physics) to shake hands and sign one of my ATLAS LEGO models.
Organised by the University of Manchester, we had a very nice sit in and had him chat about his last weeks, how he got informed of his award and where he was (hiding) when he got to know about it. The particle physics group invited me to come over with my model and prepare everything for the day, where he also received a honorary degree from the university.
Quite an interesting week(end) that just ended. Besides the follow-up work for the CERN Open Days (deciding in winners, cleaning up, preparing shipments, etc.), I was preparing the Kulturnatten (open days) event of the particle physics group at the Niels Bohr Institute. Unfortunately the central organisation did not spend as much time thinking about the event as we did. Anyways, I think we made the best out of it and it actually went quite well. We had one auditorium with usual stuff like posters, videos and the LEGO models, plus our new self-made cloud chamber, which worked like charm for several hours. I spent almost four hours straight giving talks about ATLAS and more. A fact my voice seems to thank me for now :(
That done, and after only three and a half hours of sleep, we had the 2013 Fotohalbmarathon coming up on Saturday. This year we ended up with in total twelve teams taking part in the end. Some entered late, some had to cancel on short notice. But it’s a nice number, and people seemed to have enjoyed it.
After that, I started preparing my trip to Manchester, which I am going to start in only a few hours. Once more, I had to disassemble and pack the original Copenhagen LEGO model and I will take it on the plane in a bit.
Together with some people from Manchester, I will rebuild it tomorrow and on Wednesday non other than Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs is going to sign it :)
I am admittedly quite excited :)
What a weekend, what a weekend! I am dead, but it was great!
After driving the institute car from Copenhagen to Berlin (Monday), from Berlin to Frankfurt (Tuesday) and from Frankfurt to Geneva (Wednesday); I finally arrived at CERN on Wednesday afternoon last week. It took two and a half days, until Friday evening, to set up an amazing tent for the CERN Open Days 2013. On about 50 square meters I had three large tables covered by roughly 30 kilograms of random LEGO pieces, both ATLAS LEGO models on display, various posters about the models and physics on the walls and an amazing 2×2 46″ video wall showing the model-vs-detector-timelapse video and more.
Friday evening I took part in the Origins 2013 physics speed dating event. While all the people that had originally booked a date with me did not show up (the central organisation made it slightly difficult to find the right tent), I had some nice ad hoc speed dates with various people on all sorts of topics. I guess, the idea was quite nice, maybe the implementation was not entirely perfect. Maybe next time.
Finally on Saturday, after another night of only little sleep, the Open Days started. Apparently CERN had between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors with 20,000 people visiting the underground experiments (preliminary numbers), such as ATLAS or CMS. I had thousands of people passing through the tent and 300 participants for the Build Your Own Particle Detector competition. In between all the LEGO activities, I luckily also managed to give three tours to ATLAS, where on one of those I was wearing a helmet camera. So if all worked well, I might have a video of the tour soon.
After a long day, I spent the Sunday exploring various CERN sites together with my sister, Richard and Andrea (greetz). I had managed to book a tour for the ALICE experiment and in addition we got tickets for both ATLAS and LHCb as well. We probably could have managed to see CMS as well and repeat our 2008 Open Days trip, but we were simply too exhausted to continue.
In preparation of the CERN Open Days 2013 Google has released the CERN Streetview images. You can have a look around the LHC and all large experiments.
I spend the whole day setting up the LEGO tent for the weekend. And it turned out to be really nice. Now we just have to cope with all the people I was promised / warned about ;)
It’s been several years after his last appearance at Culture Box in Copenhagen and it’s been several months since I managed to see Laurent last time. So about time for both of us ;)
And what should I say … it was great!
After three hours of warm-up by the residents, Laurent started at 2am and continued until 6am.
Certainly long enough to make my knees hurt for the rest of the weekend. The good kinda pain though ;)
