jonny goes to england

Hey, long time no post because wordpress.com has a bug where I can’t upload pictures.. and this for multiple weeks! Quite annoying. Hope it will be fixed soon..

It happened. All three major utility bill providers (gas/electricity, water, phone) spell my name wrong in their letters.

Let’s start with British Gas, only lacking one letter:

Fair enough, could happen. Thames Water is next:

Two mistakes!

Finally, everbody’s favorite, BT:

Obviously, they got my first and lastname wrong

Maybe I should speak more clearly on the phone though..

At petticoat lane market.

Hey, I just moved into my new place! I have quite a big mess at the moment but that’ll settle

Here are some pics (from my new blackberry which has a terribly bad camera built in!):

One of the many markets directly in front of the house:

The close-by Gherkin seen through some ugly council buildings beside the flat:

And the new, massive Nido spitalfields student village house is built very close beside me.

Oh wow, already another week review. I should find back to my old form and post every second day! I’ll try

Anyway, this week I had my 1st year review on Tuesday. Basically, you present your work from the last year to your second supervisor and they (second and first supervisor) decide whether your work is satisfactory enough or not. I passed though ..

On Thursday, we had our away day from our research group. So there I had to give the second talk in this week. I presented my new paper (author notification of that paper is mid december!) and eventhough it wasn’t a great talk we still got good feedback I think.

Just now, we had viewings for my room! Lots of nice people came and my housemates have to decide for one of them. I’m moving out end of November to my new flat close to Aldgate East/Commercial street! Pics of that flat will follow at the end of this month..

Just checked:

1 British pound = 1.89124525 Swiss francs

When I came here in 2006, £1 was worth 2.50 Swiss francs! It’s so cheap here now I almost feel on holiday!!

I got a freebie by post. In a rather big, green, cardboard box. I open it up and you would never guess what was in it. Let me make a list to emphasise:

• A gold tee
• A golf ball
• A hearing aid

A what?! A hearing aid. Together with a description how nice it is to hear properly and how their plastic plug releases me from my pain.

Here’s the picture:

I came across an empty tube waggon at night. Don’t know why it was that deserted. Since I was all alone I loudly whistled the Pipi Langstrumpf theme, just for the sake of it.

Not many updates recently, I’m busy looking for flats and other stuff .. more posts later!

I’m just wondering what happened to the layout of my blog. Somehow it doesn’t look like how it supposed to ..

*Update*: Ah, wordpress automatically updated the theme from Journalist v1.3 to v1.9. I reverted it back …

(I am no physicist at all – so my descriptions will be inaccurate!)

On Wednesday 10 September the LHC — Large Hadron Collider — at CERN will get its first particle beam injected! That’s an amazing time for physics and actually the whole world. The BBC (and 250 other media organisations) will cover this event for the whole day with a special “Big Bang” programme.

Basically, the LHC is a large,expensive (6 billion euro) underground (down to 130m below the surface) ring of supercooled magnets which accelerate atomic particles to almost the speed of light. Two particle beams will be directed towards each other to create collisions. Four absolutely massive detectors will analyse the resulting smashed particles for certain properties. To give you an impression of the size of these detectors. One of them, CMS — Compact Muon Solenoid — is a monster containing, accoding to BBC, more iron than the Eiffel Tower and weighting 12′500 tons (more than 30 Jumbojets).

One of the experiments is to see whether an elementary particle, predicted by the so called Standard Model of physics, can be observed. The Standard Model is basically a huge formula which lets you express all possible interactions between the known physical forces. Everything works fine .. however one particle has been introduced to make the maths work which only exists in theory. The so called Higgs Boson.

This higgs boson is the missing link to explain how some elementary particles have mass (the bosons) and some others don’t (the photon). It is explain that, some particles when they change velocity they receive a certain amount of resistance from the so called Higgs Field. This resistance is the origin of inertial mass. Other particles however accelerate without being influenced by the Higgs Field. Kind of like moving a spoon through honey gives you a certain resistance while a very thin blade wouldn’t experience that drag.

If the Higgs Boson would not be detected by one of the LHC experiments then physicists would have to reconsider their standard model of how the natural forces work together.