Moving

Not my favorite pastime.

Unfortunately, in a field as international as particle physics, it kind of comes as part of the job.

This time, we lasted only a year before we had to move on, albeit this was not job-related, but rather landlord-related.

Luckily we were able to find something close by, so the move was less stressful than others had been.

So we can still use the same voltage for our appliances, and even the plugs are the same (You would think that something as trivial as a plug would be easy to standardize across borders. I'm sure it actually would be, but apparently there is no interest in this. Maybe with the opening of the European job market, this will change. I hope people don't attach something like national pride to the design of their plugs.)

So now all our stuff has changed places again. I can't really call the move finished, because we had still a large fraction of our stuff in boxes before the move. But move number 7 in the past 11 years is in the books. Here's to hoping the next one won't be due for a few years.

The Higgs

What an exciting day to be a particle physicist!
The observation of the Higgs boson was announced today at CERN.
This particular particle has been long sought after, but searches at LEP, the Tevatron, and other facilities have failed to produce conclusive evidence for its existence. Today's announcement is the result of a lot of hard work from a very large number of people, including the ones whose search came up short.
Since the Higgs has been missing for so long, we kind of know already a lot about it. It's like putting together a puzzle. Even if you are missing a piece, you know exactly what it looks like based on the pieces that you do have. There are other blogs, who can explain much better what we think it looks like, for example Flip Tanedo's.
I'm an experimentalist. What we need to do now is measure the Higgs back and forth, inside and out. We need to look at it, and understand if it's really the last missing piece in our puzzle. There are some other very important questions, none of which can really be answered by our current flavor of puzzle, the Standard Model.
Personally, I hope this discovery opens the door to even more questions.

First Post!

Welcome, dear friend.
I am a Physicist and currently work at CERN.
I would like to take you on a journey through the world of a particle physicist working in one of the most exciting places on the planet, in a very promising time.
On the other hand, "May you live in interesting times" is allegedly also a Chinese curse.
We shall see where the journey will take us. It will be slow at times, but interesting, nevertheless, I hope.