ATLAS SUSY workshop and a bit of spare time in Brighton last week. Unfortunately the weather was best on the days of the workshop and real British during my last day.
Anyways … workshop and hotel where nice, I found two caches and spotted some number plates ;)
What should I say, the last week has been quite interesting and maybe a little bit too much.
Friday, 19 September it all started with a – at first – smooth road trip from Munich to Hamburg. Unfortunately, two road blocks turned the whole thing into an exhausting ten hour drive.
After some relax time with friends (greetz), it was time for the first BYOPD event in September on Saturday. The “Tag der Forschung” (Day of Research) at the HZG in Geesthacht turned out to be very successful event for BYOPD with over 75 participants. After eight hours of science, Legos and kids, the day found a deserved end with a great BBQ (thanks).
On Sunday it took me another ten hours to drive back to Munich. Only bearable due the fact that I found a very nice geocache along the way ;)
After a too short night, I was on the way to Oxford to spend some days (including my last two days of parental leave) talking and thinking about SUSY after the restart of the LHC in 2015.
Here it also turned out, that I apparently not only found treasures on my previous road trip, but also two ticks happily
After finding my way back home and sleeping for four hours, I made my way back to the airport (good thing the ticket I used to get into town was still valid) with all the Legos to go to Geneva.
The PopScience event – part of the European Researches’ Night – took place the FNAC store in the centre of Geneva and featured yet another BYOPD event in September. Not as big as the other one, but still with some very nice contributions.
Today there’s finally some spare time to write this and I am very much looking forward to get to the airport and back home :)
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 :)
