Profile

I work at CERN, for a University in South Africa and an Academic Institution in Taiwan. The experiment I work on is called ATLAS, and it’s one of the 4 large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Why do we do particle physics? Well, really, it’s so that we can find out more about the universe that we live in. Why do we want to find out more about the universe? Well – there is a lot of stuff that we don’t understand about the universe and how it works. But every time we have had a breakthrough, awesome new technology has come as a spin off. Your computer, for example, wouldn’t have been possible without the breakthrough in our understanding of quantum mechanics – how the universe works on really small scales. And that GPS in your car would keep being incorrect if we didn’t have Einstein’s theories of Relativity. Basically, today’s science is tomorrow’s technology.

So how do we do this?

Imagine that you’ve never seen a car before, and I give you one, right here in front of you. To really understand how it works you’d probably want to take it apart, look at all the pieces and how they fit and work together. But now imagine that I’d shrunk the car down really really small, so small that you couldn’t take it apart by yourself. The only thing you could do was make it move. How would you figure out what it was made of?

Well, one thing you could do is drive two of these mini-cars together, and have them crash (collide). If they’re going slowly then they’d probably just bounce off each other, which overall is pretty boring if you want to find out what they’re made of. But if you smash them together when they’re going really fast (ie, they have a LOT of energy) – well, then interesting things can happen! Maybe the roof breaks off and goes one way while the trunk goes another.  Maybe the next time, you have a tyre flying this way, and a mirror going the other. Maybe a third time everything shatters into little pieces and you’re left with just the engine block. If you do this enough times you can eventually get an idea of what the car is made up of.

And then maybe – just maybe – one time the cars smoosh together and out pops a whole new car!

This is kinda like what we do at the LHC – only in our case, our cars are protons. We smash the protons together and look at the tyres, and mirrors, and pistons that come flying out of the collisions. And if we’re lucky, very very occasionally, we get that new shiny car popping out too.

Well, I get up usually around 6:30 or 7am (or whenever my son wakes up!) and after dropping him off at playschool I get in to work around 9. I’ll check emails, facebook, reddit, start downloading the output of any jobs I had running overnight on the grid, and either get to plotting some results or working on a new bit of code. Usually my advisor drops in during the morning for a chat and an update, sometimes we chat over coffee in the cafeteria.

I have lunch around 12pm, and then it’s back to the office for an afternoon much like the morning. Some afternoons I have some meetings where I usually show my latest results. I leave work around 6pm, pick up my son and head home. After my kid goes to sleep at 9pm I usually do a bit more work in the evening and get to sleep around 1am.