Category Archives: Physics

A book, two bottles of wine and my name on Amazon

DFDDA

Today, I received this very nice box with two copies of the book “GoBD und Big Data: Neue Herausforderungen für die digitale Datenanalyse”, two bottles of wine and a kind letter from the Deggendorfer Forum zur digitalen Datenanalyse e.V., to celebrate the publication of the proceedings for the annual meeting I went to end of June.

It’s also a celebration of my first book as an author on Amazon :)

Thanks a lot to Prof. Georg Herde and the DFDDA e.V. for inviting me and of course for the gift box :)

Latest and greatest from ATLAS and CMS

run280673_final10_display

This week ATLAS and CMS have presented their latest and greatest in results obtained with the 13 TeV data set recorded in 2015. Quite an event with some interesting, though not yet exciting, results. Yet the theory community, or at least parts therein, got a bit crazy about some of the results.

I guess we’ll have to wait for our publication aiming for Moriond 2016 to get to the really interesting stuff ;)
Just kidding … well, the last part is true, we are aiming for first public results in March 2016.

It’s public …

… my first ever public note on outreach :)
Building Blocks of the Universe – using stackable plastic bricks to impart knowledge in particle physics

ATL-OREACH-PUB-2015-001Abstract: This article presents possibilities to impart knowledge of and enthusiasm for particle physics to essentially all non-expert target audiences by the use of LEGO bricks and models of particle physics experiments built from these. Methods of using LEGO models, both as a passive exhibit and as part of interactive outreach events, are presented, along with a historical review of the “Build Your Own Particle Detector” programme and the corresponding idea of hosting competitions in building detector models in LEGO pieces as a perfect setting to grasp people’s attention, get them involved and ultimately convey knowledge in particle physics to them.

PopScience, BYOPD and PhD Comics

Yesterday, we had another PopScience BYOPD event in Geneva. While it was a bit calm in the morning it ended up quite nice with a decent number of visitors/participants in the afternoon. In fact, I had Jorge Cham, creator of PhD Comics,  joining the competition. Unfortunately, I missed his talk and the showing of the PhD Movie sequel the day before. Luckily, I could make it up with a nice autograph from him (see below).
For the actual European researchers’ night, there were discussion of the physics in movies such as Gravity, Interstellar, Star Trek or Angels & Demons as well as a screening of Particle Fever and a discussion with some of physics cast.