Inspiration

Four days left of the IAS School; the last days are going to be filled with a lot of smaller talks from different people, in contrast to the first two weeks where we've had short lecture-series from the same lecturer. But it's been a really cool and inspiring experience. And after having, for some time, been leaning towards a future career in theoretical physics I'm starting to consider experimental physics more and more. Especially after having met and listened to some very inspiring experimental physicists, like for example Albert de Roeck who works at CERN and more specifically at the CMS experiment.

From the left: Albert de Roeck, me and Yosef Nir.

And there has been a lot interesting topics like for example the Higgs particle (which there has been a lot of talks about), the nature of dark matter and candidates for dark matter, quark gluon plasmas, string theory and of course accelerators and the experiments connected to them. Just for the sake of name dropping, examples of the latter are RHIC with PHENIX, LHC with ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb, SLAC, the old LEP (which LHC replaced) and future colliders like ILC and CLIC.

I must say that accelerators are really cool (that could have been a pretty bad joke here since the LHC operates at 1.9 K), and if they where cool before the IAS school they are now just awesome.

One of the larger proponents of the LHC, especially in theoretical physics, is the man below, John Ellis. He was one of the main attractions of the school since in addition to being a great physicist he is also a great speaker. He has one of the best examples on how to explain what the Higgs particle is and how it works!

But I must say that a lot of the older physicists are really bad with computers and modern technology in general. Feels weird that they treat computers like magic boxes especially considering what they work with.

Anyway, think I've caught a cold, my head feels a bit heavy and that is kind of annoying. Luckily there is no training this week due to the Chinese/Lunar New Year. So a couple of more hours of lectures and then home to do nothing and try to cure myself.