All posts by Sascha

Origins 2013 and CERN Open Days

30 September 2013CERN, Geneva, OutreachSascha

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.

Now I just want to sleep …

CERN Streetview released

26 September 2013CERN, Outreach, PhysicsSascha

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 ;)

Laurent @ Culture Box

26 August 2013Copenhagen, MusicSascha

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 ;)

More LEGO updates

13 August 2013Bergen, Norway, Outreach, PhysicsSascha

A lot of LEGO related things happened within the past days/weeks :)

I just came back from my trip to Bergen/Norway, where – besides taking some holidays – I spent a couple of days building yet another ATLAS LEGO model.
Only this time, I was only observing a bunch of kids (up to ten at a time) doing the actual construction of both the large and the small model. The whole thing was organised as part of the biannual meeting of the Norwegian Physics Society, which also invited me to give a plenary talk about outreach with plastic bricks, and my new Build Your Own Particle Detector programme. It was great fun, everybody learned something and I’ll certainly do it again … Thanks to the Bergen people for inviting me :)

Yesterday, I found the new issue of PhysicsWorld at the institute, which features yet another nice little article about the models and their success in the LEGO Cuusoo programme.

Today, I could convince LEGO to support my Build Your Own Particle Detector programme with a few more kilos of LEGO bricks, which we will certainly need for the CERN Open Days in late September.
Speaking of those, I finally will get my own 54 square meters tent again. Which will be packed if the expected number of visitors is actually true :)

Last but not least, we’ll do the same thing for Kulturnatten in Copenhagen, 11 October 2013.

Honour & Glory – UEFA Women’s Championship

28 July 2013Football, Honour & GlorySascha

The tournament itself is over and so is the Honour & Glory competition.

This time we had twelve participants and I cannot say I don’t like the final result ;)
Congratulations to Craig and Kristian (and the random numbers) for the places!
Along with loads of Honour & Glory, the prizes will be handed over soon!

Thanks everyone for taking part! See you for the next event (probably FIFA World Cup 2014)!