Day 12 Ron Howard and the Antimatter Machine

Phew!

It has been another busy day and there are just not enough hours in the day..... I've had to borrow a couple of hours from Friday to do this! If only i could be a quantum particle.......(Hint look at Quantum tunneling....)

We had a really funny and interesting Lecture by Rolf Landua on Antimatter at CERN. It was really interesting and worth the early start. I'm looking forward to his lecture at 9.15 this morning. (It is Friday!) I won't go into the details except from the following:-

(i) Unfortunately there is no warp drive being developed here
(ii) Research has resulted in the production of Anti-Hydrogen particle
(iii) Ron Howard visited CERN in preparation for the new 'Angels and Demons' movie!!!!

If you go to YouTube and search for, 'Ron Howard at Cern' you will see a clip of him and Rolf, (the guy in the black shirt) being shown around the Antimatter Decelerator lab. Go check it out! Especially the last 20 seconds of the clip!

I also had a another lecture by Michelangelo Mangano about what scientists hope to find using the LHC. This was particularly interesting as it brought together a lot of the things which we have done so far and things started to fall into place. Again, some of the theory was above my understanding but i liked his elucidation of how as scientists, we can ask 'How' questions that are 'easy' to answer, (How does a light bulb work, how do we cool things down) and 'Why' questions which fundamentally we cannot answer unless we truly understand things within a frame work at a fundamental level. (i.e. Why are there two types of electric charge? Why do quarks have three generations of particles)

In the afternoon, i was given a tour of the factory where they produce antimatter! For those who do not know, antimatter is the opposite of matter. The best way is to think of it as matter being an object and antimatter the reflection of that object in a mirror.

When these two collide, they can release immense amounts of energy. (As mentioned in Dan Brown's 'Angels and Demons' and it is also the power source of the Warp Drive in Star Trek!) Now, unfortunately, we are only able to currently produce a small amount of this antimatter. There is still a lot of research to be done which i will hopefully be able to talk more about after the second Antimatter lecture.

However, they are experiments currently set-up to test the application of anti-protons in medical physics to kill cancer cells more effectively....... i may perhaps mention more of this later on.