2012/02/20

marketcracy and demodure

Occidental countries when on wars like modern crusades to propagate the democracy. Occident have imposed the democracy to the "retarded" countries. We have imposed by force, what we say it's the best way of government. We have deposed tyrannies to impose democracy by the words of the guns. Replace dictadures by demodures.


But at the same time, when the citizen people are requiring something to the governments, they are not listened. People is illiterate and the enlightened is only in the hand of the government. Event if the people is requiring the things pacifically or by violent protest, the lit have it's tools to quiet the protests.


Markets are forcing countries to suspend the democracies (with casino practices). Now is the market abstraction who talks with our representatives and they translate to the people what have been transmitted to them.


In the marketcracy, we vote to choose the interlocutor to the oracle of the market. And our representatives obeys to its designate justifying the sacrifices that the people must do (not apply it to the representatives or the rich).


In the name of the gods money and debt, we have to kill a virgin worker every hour or they will became angry and the consequences will be worst.


I have to insist, this gods doesn't exist.

2012/02/06

Chasing the higgs

Since December many words has been written about the Higgs search in the high energy physics. Recently I have read in the Spanish translation of the "Scientific American" (called "Investigación y Ciencia") a text (not a peer reviewed article) about the Higgs that I think is specially good for newbies in this field.


Usually the blog who talks about the Higgs often uses many technical words and graphics. Nothing to say about the images drawings like:
From cms web site
In my words (I'm a computer scientist, neither this is peer reviewed!). When you remove everything from a portion of the space to have it in the highest possible vacuum, there is still something there. This vacuum have some entity, a non zero field that fills everything. This field, dramatically can make you think in the idea of the ether, but it's should be completely different.


The standard model have some mathematical transformations (usually named symmetries) who not only gives beauty to the theory, it has many behaviour consequences specially in between the interactions.


Physicist knows very well the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, nuclear week, and strong, and also the oldest we know even if it's the one we know less about, the gravitation). This forces are a consequence from this mathematical symmetries in the standard model. This explains many properties of the particles, except one "small" detail: the mass.


This symmetries in the model says that the mater particles shouldn't have mass, but we know it's there. Even more, the force carrier particles shouldn't have mass, and in general they hasn't, but the bosons W and Z have mass.


In the 60's, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Wienberg and Abdus Salam (they are 1979 Physics Nobel Price)  introduces the Higgs mechanism  (proposed 1962 by Philip Warren Anderson and developed in 1964 by three independent groups, in one of them were Peter Higgs). The idea is simple, this field can be imagined like a viscose liquid who fills completely all the space, and the friction on this liquid gives to the particles what we see as mass. The waves made on this liquid when the particles agitates it, are the the higgs particles.


Some particles flow better in this higgs field, and looks like they have a very small mass. Some others have a big interaction and looks like very massive. And there are particles who didn't interact at all with it, being unmassed.


What are high energy physics colliders searching for? It's highly difficult to detect the higgs particles itself, and much more complicate because they decay very fast. But what it's possible to detect are the products of this disintegrations. What the LHC (and its predecessors) is trying to see in the detectors (specially Atlas and CMS) are this subproducts of the disintegration. Even that this events where they appear, are very difficult to detect.


The LEP (LHC predecessor were the tunnel is the same) has set a lower limit in 114GeV and the highest level would be at 800GeV. But with the results published in the 13th of December, this window has been reduces with a trust of the 95%, in two smaller windows. One between 600GeV and 800GeV (but other experimental results may exclude this window). and the most hopped window is between 115GeV and 128GeV (indirect results of the LEP studies also points to this window). Even more, this window have a substantial probability to have the higgs in between 125GeV and 126GeV.


But this doesn't mean that the higgs exist. There is also a probability that the higgs doesn't exist and the excesses detected are statistical fluctuations and systematic errors... This 2012 the analysis will have much more data. Last week there were the LHC performance workshop where has been decided the setup for the collider this year. Beams energy increased to 4TeV (collisions @ 8TeV), bunches separation of 25ns (they were 50ns, means the double of bunches in the beam, with a pile-up effect), and reduced the beta-star parameter to increase the luminosity (from 1m to 60cm).


21th of March will start again the beam operations.


Update 20120213: Some news point to 4 TeV beam (colliding at 8TeV) with 50ns bunch separation and beta-star at 0.6. Not very different that 2011 configuration, but enough to have  the 16.5/fb collisions predicted to be enough to find the Higgs.







2012/02/02

Work from home or what you like



Today, due to the snow in the vicinity, the loudspeakers in Alba's facility have order an unscheduled shutdown of the machine and its beamlines. All the workers had to left the building to go home. Further information to the workers will be sent by email.


Situation like that had happen the past 8th of March in 2010 (picture taken @ 15:12):




I think will not be the same than today @ 10:22:



It's not usual to have snow in the area of Barcelona, but the pictures are very similar. I hope we will not live the chaos of 2010. We would had to learn something...

Update 20120203: Finally the snow wasn't chaotic. Even that the photos are very similar, in 2010 the picture has been taken at the time when the storm went to worse. It was the beginning. After 1 hour the storm was harder, and at 2 hour huge transport problems collapse communications.

Yesterday, the picture has been take when, after we saw, the maximum of the precipitation. At midday, the news says that in the afternoon would have something like an storm. But the clouds went throw the sea, with any other problem for the people.

We've been lucky this time. You only know if it's overreacting or underreacting when you look it from the future. But if you have to choose, it's better to decay to overreact than underreact.