December 20, 2005
Yesterday was the first of several birthday parties that Sonia will have--on Sunday I 
made a monster batches of brownies, dutifully put nuts in only half the batter, and brought the whole thing to the Fermilab Children's Center in time for the afternoon snack on Monday where Sonia was serenaded by about 12 kids, her parents, and Teacher Jennifer (pictured at the left). Her two other birthday parties will be tomorrow (which is her real birthday) with my parents and grandparents in Florida, and then a joint birthday party in two weeks with one of Sonia's classmates who is about 4 weeks younger than Sonia.
This week most schools near Fermilab are not open, so lots of folks have already started taking vacation, and the parts of the lab have been blissfully quiet: there is much better parking, which means a shorter walk in single-digit temperatures to get into the high rise (pictured at left).
However, the twelth floor of the high rise, which houses both the MINOS control room and many MINOS offices (both visitors from Universities and lab employees) is a very busy place. There is a collaboration meeting in Oxford at the end of the first week of January, and the collaboration is busy writing "position papers" which describe the tests we want to perform to prove we know the data well enough to "open the box".
A relatively recent phenomenon in (particle) physics has been the idea that you want to blind yourself to the data at some level, so that you do not bias your measurement by just working until the number you measure agrees with the number you expected to measure. So MINOS wants to figure out as much as possible about the way our detector works, and how our neutrino beam works, and has been figuring out ways to do lots of checks on our understanding without actually making the measurement we're trying to make. The term people use for this is called "blinding" the analysis, and somehow the act of taking the blindfolds off is called "opening the box".
Different parts of Fermilab prepare for the holidays in different ways: many folks put up some kind of festive decorations, some are much more festive than others. For the first 
time in the 5 years I've been on the 12th floor, there is a tiny Christmas tree right next to my office, put up by several of the post-docs on MINOS. I am all for more greenery in offices in the first place, but I actually laughed out loud when I saw the present at the bottom of the tree: it's a plain box that says "Do not open until January 9" (or was it January 8) which is the day of the collaboration meeting where if we can convince ourselves that we know what we're doing then the blinders will come off. Unfortunately since the end of the year will be the end of this blog, interested readers will simply have to find out some other way whether we opened the box in the first place, and what we saw if we did open the box.
The time difference between opening the box and getting the result out to the public is an unknown. However, I would be willing to bet that before Sonia's next birthday (not to be confused with her next birthday party) we'll all know a whole lot better than we know today just how often neutrinos change flavors between here and Minnesota!
I wonder if it's a cat and some radioactive material
Posted by: Ruth Thomas | December 26, 2005 at 02:24 PM