Day 9 Random Talks and Why the Internet was Invented

Slept in today as my alarm clock failed to go off! Or maybe i was so tired i just didn't hear it.

I was really tempted to skip the first lecture but it was Cosmology which i am really interested in. In particular we were given some arguments as to why Dark Matter and Dark Energy exists. There was some good thecnical data and evidence to back up the arguments. I won't go into the details of it as they are quite technical and i'm not sure i understand them fully either.

They also rely on some graphs and pictures which of course, by now, you know i cannot as yet put on the this blog. However, i will endeavour to download the powerpoints so that i can go over them and maybe redigest for pupil consumption. In summary though, the reason why Dark Matter/Energy has been postulated as they are required to explain certain phenomena that has been observed.

in many ways this is how Science can sometimes work - theoreticians come up with ideas to try and explain the things they see and they check their ideas are correct by testing them in experiments. If they don't match or are wrong, they go back and revise their ideas until they come to something which works.

A quick observation. I noticed our lecturer Jonathan Ellis had a very messy desktop as he was trying to set-up his presentation. I wonder if his virtual desktop is messy, what would his real one be like? (For those who have seen my desk they will know that if you ever need to find anything - just dig!!!! It will be under a pile of something!)

As i was having my lunch today i struck up a conversation with one of the CERN staff. It was pretty random but that is one of the things i like about this place. Quite often you can be sitting beside or talking to a Nobel Prize winner and be not even realise it!!! ( I haven't gone to the stage of asking for autographs yet........)

Anyhow, i was speaking this guy, (I never found out his name) who works on the accelerator and i was asking him what does CERN actually do. It is strange but CERN doesn't really do research as such. They are like a big Hire Shop. They provide the equipment and expertise to do experiments with subatomic particles and collect the data as well. This is then passed onto other Institutions which to the analysis or 'real science'.

To pass this data on quickly and efficiently, they do this mainly through the Internet. This in my opinion is why the internet was invented! I was told that if all the data was collected in one year's worth of experiment was to be burned onto CD and stacked together, it would reach 8km high!!!!