Claire Gray

HUGS day 3: Renormalization

Quote(s) of the day (Krishna Kumar again):

on Renormalization in electroweak theory...

    "They were absolutely convinced that the theory was right. Me, I would have just said No Way!"

    "...you just take the infinities and play with them..."

on virtual photons:

    "What's a virtual photon, anyway? We just believe it! Why do we believe it? Because the theory works."

on CERN's particle accelerator:

    "Imagine crossing the border 45'000 times a second - you pay customs every time!"

After two nights of supper at Ryan's we decided to try somewhere else last night. There's Nawab, an Indian place up the road, and we invited Krishna to come with us. Luckily he goes there quite often and enjoyed educating us on the different constituents of Indian food. I also got to try some Indian beer, which beats the Bud Light and Miller Light you get here by a few orders of magnitude. Left to right around the table are: Richard, Lamiaa, Krishna, Brian, Ryan,  Scott, Mat, Jim and Mark.

After dinner we bought some beer, went back to the ResFac, and played some poker. Scott (right) has his own poker chips that he carries around with him. So you can imagine who won in the end! :D Now we had had horrible rainy weather the entire day, and we were all pretty sick and tired of being inside for so long. So somebody decided it would be a good idea to go play midnight volleyball in the rain - the ResFac has a beach volleyball court. We found a rather flat volleyball in the gym room, put on shorts and missioned off for an hour or two of what most (normal?) people would have considered insanity.

It was fun.
*grin*

And by the end of it, we were sopping wet, freezing cold (ie. cold enough to sober up) and covered in sand from head to toe. Boy, did my arms hurt this morning! And if our coordination is anything to go by, we're going to be doing physics for a long, long time!

(right: Clausell took the sensible option and stayed dry to watch the NBA)

HUGS day 2: Karaoke Time

The second day of HUGS kicked off with the first of six lectures on The Phases of QCD by Thomas Schaefer. Very theoretical. In fact, i hadn't realised over the past six months or so just how much of an experamentalist I have become. A year ago this realization would have driven me to search for some suitable penance, but now I officially say that I am proud of it.

(I can just see Chris and my classmates from last year rolling on the floor laughing!)

But all this is irrelevant, actually, when it comes to this particular post, and my recent transition has nothing to do with the quality of the lecture. It was actually really interesting, though I tended to get lost in the midst of Lagrangian densities.

After Phases we had another lecture on Proton Tomography (proton pancakes), then it was lunch, another Phases, and then a new topic, Electroweak Physics, by Krishna Kumar.

Electroweak had me hooked from the start, Kumar is a fantastic lecturer, and giving a course that could unofficially be entitled "Electroweak theory for experimentalists who don't like big nasty equations" was bound to go down well :) The quote of the day definitely came from this lecture... I think Kumar was talking about adding more and more particles to make the theory work, because "when you're a theorist you can cook up anything you want!"

Anyway, enough of physics. We went back to Ryan's for dinner again, and then Scott thought that it would be a good idea to go to the Mexican place across the street from JLab, Plaza Azteca, for karaoke. In the end it was only four of us who went: Scott, Chris, Jim and me. Well it was interesting, the first time I ever did karaoke was on the second night straight of partying for my 18th birthday, "I Got You Babe" with my gay friend Eugene. It was horrible! So somehow Scott convinced me to do it again with him, but I needed courage (read: beer) beforehand. So while I mustered some courage, Scott sang "Beyond the Sea" and then Chris sang "Dead Man's Party".

Well let me tell you Scott is an amazing singer, and by the end of the evening he even had a bit of a fan club! Anyway, when it closed at 10pm the karaoke guy convinced us to go back there on Saturday night for an even bigger party. So tomorrow that's where we'll be. And Bob, you'd better join us this time!

PS I have just found out that you can view the slides from the talks by going to the HUGS website program schedule and following the links from there.