I haven’t attempted a post from my phone for quite a while now. In fact, I haven’t posted in a while at all. This isn’t the long overdue update, however, but a post to share some of my current boredom with you all. How generous am I?!

I’m sitting in the Cavendish Laboratory at the moment, with a projector throwing images from a particle physics experiment onto the table in front of me. The slides come from an experiment at the famous CERN particle accelerator, no less, but trust me when I say it’s no where near as cool as it sounds. The data is from an experiment over 40 years ago, and analysing the images is very much like staring at a cracked ceiling for hours on end. I’m meant to be looking at the probability of a given particle decaying into either 2 or 3 particles, and this is done by looking at photos of tracks in a bubble chamber and counting the number of each type of decay observed.

Now, in the process of reading that you may have noticed a heavy feeling in your eyelids, or perhaps an almost uncontrollable urge to run screaming from the room. Allow me to assure you that the effect is even more potent when experienced directly. I’ve only examined about 15 slides so far, and I can look forward to perhaps another 40. And that’s only on this stage of the experiment.

The advantage of all this suffering, however, is that it gets another module out of the way, and a whole lecture series I don’t need to revise for the exams in June. The experimentation part goes on until a week on Friday, and the write-up is them due in the following Wednesday. It’s gonna be a hoot. Back to the wonderful world of impenetrable spider’s webs…