ALICE in bricks

Over the past four months, and together with Christian Klein-Boesing, Marcus Mikorski and a few others, we have been running a workshop for high-school and early-university students to design and build the ALICE Experiment at CERN in LEGO bricks.
As part of the weekly meetings we had with the students we also introduced basic concepts of particle, heavy-ion and detector physics.

The workshop series was organised and funded by the ErUM-FSP T01 project “Expansion of ALICE at the LHC: experiments with the ALICE detector at CERN”, which in turn is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The first models in real-live bricks are foreseen to be build end of June 2021 at Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Münster, with both their ALICE groups taking a leading role in this effort.

The designs and parts lists will be made available on the Build Your Own Particle Detector website to join the already existing LEGO models of other LHC experiments.

Here’s a few rough teaser renderings from the current state of affairs …

Stay tuned for more updates to come soon!

[edit] The project has also been presented at the spring meeting of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) that started today.

VideoConf Games

Over the past couple of months I have hosted a few online game nights via various video conferencing tools …

Here’s a few examples of online (video) platforms I have used ..

And here’s a few of the games we’ve played ..

Let me know if have tried any other (party) games playable with friends online (without everyone having to buy and install a game) …

“Locked Out”

“Locked Out” is the title for a piece I created in memory of the 19 hours we’ve been locked out of our apartment last week, due to a material defect in our apartment-door lock.

A broken piece inside the locking mechanism of the door caused the key to turn inside the lock cylinder without actually moving the bolt in the lock (obviously this we only learned after all the hassle). After informing the janitor at about 8pm, him calling two somewhat suspicious ‘locksmith’ services, quite a bit of waiting time and both failing on the door after trying out all their arsenal on the lock, we called it a night at about 12:30am and joined our kids at some friends’ place.

After sending the kids to school on borrowed clothes, food and school equipment, we got back to the action with another locksmith who at least didn’t even try and just recommended a dedicated expert. Around around lunch time the forth (well, maybe the first real) locksmith arrived and took about two more hours to open the door with heavy machinery (and brain).