Time to say goodbye

Well friends, the time has come.  The change to my layout was designed to invoke change and a renewed sense of vigor to my writing but I find myself so constrained in format and style.  I've wanted to make the jump for some time and frankly I didn't want to lose all of the stuff I've been posting for the past 1075 days.  But, I found that there is a simple way to transfer all of my blogs from one blogging site to another.  

As such my friends, please update your links if you care to continue following my lunatic ramblings in the future because I have moved to Wordpress.  Here is my new blog site:

http://chevron7locked.wordpress.com/

I hope you'll keep reading and thanks for following this long.  Thanks also to Blogspot for getting me started.  

Shakin' it up

Well friends, I felt the need for a change.  I hope it doesn't bother anyone too much.  I apologize now for the formating chaos this will wreak upon my old posts that have pictures and commentary.  Also, if you find that the color of a link is vague or confusing in my posts, be sure to let me know.  Being incredibly blessed with OCD, I can't see that happening.  That's all I have.  Carry on!

Eager Beaver

8 weeks and 4 days and then I'll be back in the States again.  I have to say, I'm really excited.  Although the advent of Spring here in Giessen has caused the days to go by faster, in reality, they seem to be slowing down.  There is a drag on my life clock like an electron beam slowing down ion beams to reduce their energy spread.  What can I do about that?  Not the ion beam but my life clock.  Write more?  Well with the nice weather, Rachel and I will be going out more often and for longer periods.  I guess I could tell of a few adventures we've had in the past week or so.  

There is a castle that one can see from the train station in Giessen.  It looks close but is really 8 km away.  Since seeing it the first time we arrived in Giessen, we have wanted to walk to it but never got around to doing it.  We had a nice day forecast, made some lunch, grabbed our water and went out the door!  I had done some searching using Google to figure out the general path and it was crazy.  The path wound across big roads and whittled down to dirt paths through farm land.  Oddly enough, it didn't seem as far on the way back.  We figured that's because we definitely knew how far we had to go still.  The picture from the top of the tower is facing towards Giessen.  

In other news, a large group of my friends, an equal number of Americans, Germans and French, decided to attack the restaurant known colloquially as the XXL restaurant.  It was actually Der Waldgeist and it has some of the largest plates of food you'll ever see.  The burgers were at least 6 full size restaurant burgers put together.  Knowing my limits, I settled for 600 grams of currywurst, which was amazing.  My friend Jeff on the other hand was going for the burger and very nearly made it through it.  People from other tables were watching him as he tried to finish it.  Finally, he got smart and stopped before he killed himself.  He did have 2 liters of beer to finish as well.  Another friend, Gökhan, was not so lucky with his burger.  I'm sure he is posing in this picture, but the feeling was there in all of us.  Needless to say I'm thinking I won't need to visit again anytime soon.  Whew!

And finally, on Sunday Rachel and I went to the Botanical Garden to hear a live band from Kassel play.  I believe it was a fundraiser event for the garden.  The band was called "Beat That Chicken" and don't ask me to explain the name.  A soul/blues band with a full line up of instrumentalist: horn, bone, alto/tenor sax, bari sax, guitar, bass, keys, drums and two vocalists.  And they were pretty good.  I bought their CD and love it.  It was really interesting listening to the in-between song talking, in German, and the song lines, in English.  The female vocalist has a really good voice and the male seemed to be using a unidirectional microphone since I couldn't hear him half the time.  He was a little rambunctious and whenever he moved his mouth away from right in front of the mic you couldn't hear him anymore.  There is a free swing band concert on the 4th of July that we're going to hit up and a jazz innovations trio on the 20th of June.  Should be a fun summer concert series.  

That's the latest from Giessen.  More after the break.  Prost!

Perplexed

Ah!  June.  It comes after April showers and May flowers.  One might think that for a large portion of the Earth this leads to continuous sunny days.  But I can tell you that the number of warm sunny days this year I've had here in Giessen can be counted on 2 hands.  From what I hear, my home of Seattle has also been getting an extended winter.  Oregon and Montana as well.  What gives?  It's overcast and about a high of 19°C today.  This is not June 1st weather.  Does anybody have a handle on this conundrum?  I fear that spring will be glossed over altogether and I'll be forced to adapt to 32°C temperatures immediately.  Oh well.

In other news, today marks the day I first began counting down the days until my return to the States.  T-minus 69 days and counting.  

Stupid Questions

I just read a post on io9 that asked a question that irks me to no end regarding money and science.  Is it worth spending a crap-ton of money to prove [insert some science-y thing here] right/wrong?  That's the question?  I never really had a good counter argument that I really liked until I saw a fellow reader's comment back.  It went along the lines of "if we can spend crap-tons of money on movies that suck, why not on something more constructive like furthering humanity's knowledge."  Booya!  

Now, don't get me wrong.  I enjoy a beautiful CG romp of mayhem and destruction as much as the next guy, but if the plot is going to be crap it just isn't worth it.  This guy listed, among others, Transformers and the Star Wars prequels and I have to agree.  Big movies and all the money went into big names and fancy CG.  So what do we have?  2-3 hours of cool special effects, bad plot and a coaster (if you bought the movie).  I just wish that whoever funded these works of suck would consider sacrificing one movie's budget to fund a science project.  (Note: if they already do this, let me know and I'll apologize).  

To summarize, it is a ridiculous question to ask when so much money is spent on other less useful things.  But it does not have to be just on science either!  Sacrifice a movie and feed some people for a month or restore a poisoned water supply or anything like that.  I would love to hear about that happening as well.  It's just that this article was related to science so that is the first thing I thought about.  

GSI Facility in Darmstadt

No, it isn't some fancy acronym from a Command & Conquer video game.  It's the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany and I went to visit it Friday afternoon.  They have a linear accelerator (UNILAC), the accelerating synchrotron (SIS), the Experiment Storage Ring (ESR) and Fragment Separator (FRS).  It also has several other experiments set up along with a tumor therapy room.  Lest all this sound uninteresting, this is the place that put elements 107-112 on the periodic table!  Meitnerium (1982), Hassium (1984), Darmstadtium (1994), Roentgenium (1994), Bohrium (1996), and Copernicium (1996) were all created/discovered here.  Ha!  And I stood next to the machines that did it.  It was astonishing.

That tumor therapy contraption was pretty interesting as well.  Heavy ion beams are shot at a person's head for example.  The beam is made up of carbon ions, instead of the old X-ray, and these ions release all of their energy at one particular point.  Here is a picture of the Bragg Curve courtesy of Wikipedia.  

 This particular curve is for alpha particles, but X-rays don't even have that peak. They only gradually die out in energy. Carbon ions, on the other hand, have an even sharper peak than the one in this picture.  That means the technicians and scientists know exactly where, distance-wise, the ion will release all of its energy after leaving the vacuum area of the accelerator.  If they hold your head still, they have millimeter precision with targeting and destroying a tumor.  Kind of crazy when you think about it.  I would feel a little nervous about having my head at the butt end of a particle beam that just got up to 90% light speed in 2 seconds.

This picture of the facility (sorry it's a little hard to read) was taken from the GSI page linked to here.  In it you can see the blue part is the existing facility which I got to walk through (mostly).  The red is the future and it will be awesome.  With the things they can already do, I can only imagine what they'll find out with more experiments and more powerful accelerators.  I said 'mostly' earlier because they had experiments going on at the time we were there, meaning the accelerators were active and that means everything was bottled up because of radiation.  A few experiments were not being used so we did get to see some of the detectors up close and personal.  The other experiments were trapped behind locked gates with radiation 'airlock' rooms and meters worth of concrete walls.  I'm hoping to get to go back and see it again.  I still don't get particle physics, because I'm just a simple astronomer, but I do appreciate the complicated stuff they do here to better understand the universe.  

By the by, the tumor therapy room is just below and a little to the left of the ESR ring.

Pseudo Anti-Deuterons

Today in my Methods and Applications of Atomic Physics class, we discussed antiparticles and CPT symmetry conservation (Charge conjugation, Parity and Time reversal).  The CPT thing is not what I'd like to discuss.

I know that having a particle interact with its antiparticle results in mutual annihilation accompanied by a release of energy.  I asked my professor what the possibilities are for gaining energy for free by using our available energy to create an antiproton that would then collide with a proton that we didn't have to work to get.  In case that made no sense this is what I meant: (No energy expended proton source) + (some energy expended antiproton source) = More energy than we put in coming back.  He said that it takes a crap-ton (rough estimate) of energy to make antiparticles currently.  Also, the number of antiparticles the world has thus far created, although numbering in the millions (if not billions), would hardly heat a cup of water if allowed to annihilate.  Drat.

My second question was a little more abstract.  I began with making sure I understood the matter-antimatter combination.  An antiproton will only annihilate with a proton, a positron will only annihilate with an electron, and so forth, right?  He didn't sound so sure but I asked my next question anyway.  What would happen if you could put an antiproton with a regular neutron?  A normal proton and neutron form the nucleus of deuterium also know as heavy hydrogen.  45 years ago we had already made antideuterium (antiproton with antineutron), but I want to know what would happen if you could mix different matter and antimatter particles.  He said he did not know but he guessed it would be bad (his words!).  

I really don't know what the point of such a particle would be, but I suppose that since the antiproton is made up of antiquarks the annihilation would come from the quarks messing with each other.  Just wanted to share those thoughts.  Does anybody know anything about this?  Has it been done?