The first thing was that after they switched the LHC on I was still standing in my towel watching the TV. So that was cool, though I didn’t really think there’d be a problem.
The second thing was while I was walking to work. I saw a guy who I assume (based on the new academic year starting next week) is a new foreign student in our city, probably from India as we get a lot of people from there coming over for pharmacy courses etc. He was standing in Union Terrace Gardens (http://www.aboutaberdeen.com/unionterracegardens.php) taking pictures, which isn’t really unusual. But as I walked round the top of the park and came past the stairs leading down he appeared beside me and starting taking pictures of the sign saying “Union Terrace Gardens”.
What made the moment for me was when I looked back and he had his tripod in front of him as he was standing beside the sign, with his arms crossed and a massive grin on his face. He just seemed so happy to be there, taking pictures to show his family and friends back home how nice Aberdeen is.
This might seem patronising, but that’s not my intention. It just really made me smile on the way to work as it reminded me (though I’m a lot more positive than some round here) that Aberdeen is pretty damn nice.
Though obviously I didn’t think so as I got absolutely drenched walking home last night in the pissing rain
No damper, I knew that (I’ve been following the LHC very closely and have been really geeking out on the big bang recently), but after all the media nonsense it was still nice and gave me a funny setup for the main reason I was smiling when I got to the office.
Stephen Hawking, the British physicist renowned for his work on the beginning of time, said last night that he hoped that the collider would not find the Higgs particle – because that would make physics even more interesting. “I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs,” he said on British television.
We were driving around, looking for a place to dump our Silicon Pixel
Detector. Then we saw another Silicon Pixel Detector at the bottom of
a hill. And instead of dragging that one up, we threw ours down.
