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As mentioned in my previous entry, Wednesday evening was spent at the "Super K Sonic Booooum"[*] art installation in London. I had a fabulous time!
For starters, the venue -- SHUNT -- was incredible! Located in the tunnels beneath the London Bridge Rail Station, it goes on forever! In the caverns of SHUNT, there are impromptu bars that spring up or move around from night to night, there are elevated stages with musicians wandering on and off, a game room, dark corners, photography rooms, a mattress, random spontaneous avante garde performances. And, in the middle of all this, the "Super-K Sonic Booooum"!
In a room near the entrance, two of my colleagues -- postdocs from Queen Mary University of London -- gave fifteen minute talks on particle physics and neutrinos. The room, which could hold a dozen people or so, seemed to be packed. Further on, at the "Sonic Booooum", I spent nearly three hours giving boat "tours" to two or three people at a time. The event was extremely popular -- there was a long queue the entire time and, at the end, people needed to be turned away for lack of time.
Here is a picture of your friendly neighborhood Nomad, in the "Super K Sonic Booooum". They went so far as to make us wear helmets and Tyvek suits whilst in the installation, attempting to copy conditions in which we really work in the Super-Kamiokande tank. This is me, sitting in the "Super K Sonic Booooum" after about three hours of shouting over the background soundtrack of "sonic booms":
The "tours" took five minutes to ten minutes each -- depending on how fast the boat was pulled -- talking about neutrino physics and Super-Kamiokande. It took me a little while to develop a standard spiel, but I soon found what worked well and discarded what didn't. I don't think that I have ever given a more sensationalistic presentation of physics or astrophysics! On the other hand, I have never presented to a group of tipsy people... on a boat... surrounded by metallic balloons... illuminated by blacklight and strobe... with a funky electronic soundtrack in the background... in a lounge... underneath a rail station... So fair enough, right?
The "Sonic Booooum" part of the exhibition must surely come from the common description -- used by myself and others -- when explaining Cherenkov radiation. A particle moving faster than the speed of light in water emits a "light boom" (i.e., the aforementioned Chereknov radiation) that is analogous to the sonic boom produced when an object moves faster than the speed of sound in air. This description is purely an analogy -- there are never sonic booms in Super-Kamiokande! Still, the installation took the idea literally, with small booms ever present in the soundtrack... and an occasional enormous "BOOM!" where we were all supposed to put our heads between our knees for "protection". I tried to incorporate the largest explosion into my talk -- pretending it was the neutrinos from a supernova reaching the experiment...
It was cheesy, to be sure, but also a lot of fun! Not only for me, but for the people who had come to see it. Folks generally seemed to have a great time, and Nelly[**] said afterward that I had been a big hit. Although there was a boat or two filled with women too drunk to pay any attention, most people listened and asked questions. A couple of people wondered if any of this was real, which amused me. I referred them to the talks being given by "Doctor Ben" and "Doctor Ryan" in the other room for a less theatrical explanation of what I was talking about. There were also a couple of guests worth noting: For instance, the parents of one of my students (SD) showed up. So did our new MA student in the T2K group at Imperial, with his mother in tow. I hammed it up even more than usual for him -- he can get the real physics in the office later; at SHUNT, I wanted to show him a fun time. The artist recently got her MA as well -- not in physics -- and her former tutors showed up for a ride!
At several points during the evening, I was asked if I wanted somebody to relieve me so that I could take a break. I would not hear of it -- I was having a blast! As anyone who knows me can tell, I have lungs... so screaming for three hours was not terribly difficult! I even had my voice intact the next day!
Here is another picture of me at the end of the boat tours:
At the end of the evening, I packed up and made my way back to Oxford, arriving at around one o'clock in the morning. I had the company of a very lovely person to chat with on the coach ride back, which was a perfectly marvelous ending to an excellent day!
The "Super K Sonic Booooum" was indeed quite aesthetic and impressive.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
acelightning is correct in saying that this is a great way to share some sense of Super-Kamiokande's grandeur with the world. I agree wholeheartedly! Still, as my darling tawneypup noted, it does not hold a candle to the real thing. She is absolutely right. Here is a shot of me in the actual Super-Kamiokande:
The "Super K Sonic Booooum" may not measure up to my first [physics] love... but it was still an experience unlike any other that I have had in my professional life! I count myself as lucky to be in England and working on neutrino physics at the same time that this independent project -- the first of its kind that I have ever heard of -- sprang up!
[*] In my previous entry, I mistakenly spelled the name of the exhibit with a "boom" rather than a "booooum". Mea culpa. On the other hand, on the artist's web site, she mistakenly adds an "S" to the front of my boss's last name, deletes the hyphen from Super-K, and never spells out the full name of the experiment. Also, she erroneously states that Super-Kamiokande contains 50,000 tonnes of heavy water, which it does not. SK uses ultra-pure water made from ordinary water. The cost of fifty kilotonnes of heavy water (D2O) would be about $15 billion... and I'm not even sure that there is that much heavy water stockpiled on the planet! All in all, then, if we can forgive her these mistakes, I'm sure Nelly can forgive my misspelling of her installation!
[**] Nelly is the artist.
For starters, the venue -- SHUNT -- was incredible! Located in the tunnels beneath the London Bridge Rail Station, it goes on forever! In the caverns of SHUNT, there are impromptu bars that spring up or move around from night to night, there are elevated stages with musicians wandering on and off, a game room, dark corners, photography rooms, a mattress, random spontaneous avante garde performances. And, in the middle of all this, the "Super-K Sonic Booooum"!
In a room near the entrance, two of my colleagues -- postdocs from Queen Mary University of London -- gave fifteen minute talks on particle physics and neutrinos. The room, which could hold a dozen people or so, seemed to be packed. Further on, at the "Sonic Booooum", I spent nearly three hours giving boat "tours" to two or three people at a time. The event was extremely popular -- there was a long queue the entire time and, at the end, people needed to be turned away for lack of time.
Here is a picture of your friendly neighborhood Nomad, in the "Super K Sonic Booooum". They went so far as to make us wear helmets and Tyvek suits whilst in the installation, attempting to copy conditions in which we really work in the Super-Kamiokande tank. This is me, sitting in the "Super K Sonic Booooum" after about three hours of shouting over the background soundtrack of "sonic booms":
The "tours" took five minutes to ten minutes each -- depending on how fast the boat was pulled -- talking about neutrino physics and Super-Kamiokande. It took me a little while to develop a standard spiel, but I soon found what worked well and discarded what didn't. I don't think that I have ever given a more sensationalistic presentation of physics or astrophysics! On the other hand, I have never presented to a group of tipsy people... on a boat... surrounded by metallic balloons... illuminated by blacklight and strobe... with a funky electronic soundtrack in the background... in a lounge... underneath a rail station... So fair enough, right?
The "Sonic Booooum" part of the exhibition must surely come from the common description -- used by myself and others -- when explaining Cherenkov radiation. A particle moving faster than the speed of light in water emits a "light boom" (i.e., the aforementioned Chereknov radiation) that is analogous to the sonic boom produced when an object moves faster than the speed of sound in air. This description is purely an analogy -- there are never sonic booms in Super-Kamiokande! Still, the installation took the idea literally, with small booms ever present in the soundtrack... and an occasional enormous "BOOM!" where we were all supposed to put our heads between our knees for "protection". I tried to incorporate the largest explosion into my talk -- pretending it was the neutrinos from a supernova reaching the experiment...
It was cheesy, to be sure, but also a lot of fun! Not only for me, but for the people who had come to see it. Folks generally seemed to have a great time, and Nelly[**] said afterward that I had been a big hit. Although there was a boat or two filled with women too drunk to pay any attention, most people listened and asked questions. A couple of people wondered if any of this was real, which amused me. I referred them to the talks being given by "Doctor Ben" and "Doctor Ryan" in the other room for a less theatrical explanation of what I was talking about. There were also a couple of guests worth noting: For instance, the parents of one of my students (SD) showed up. So did our new MA student in the T2K group at Imperial, with his mother in tow. I hammed it up even more than usual for him -- he can get the real physics in the office later; at SHUNT, I wanted to show him a fun time. The artist recently got her MA as well -- not in physics -- and her former tutors showed up for a ride!
At several points during the evening, I was asked if I wanted somebody to relieve me so that I could take a break. I would not hear of it -- I was having a blast! As anyone who knows me can tell, I have lungs... so screaming for three hours was not terribly difficult! I even had my voice intact the next day!
Here is another picture of me at the end of the boat tours:
At the end of the evening, I packed up and made my way back to Oxford, arriving at around one o'clock in the morning. I had the company of a very lovely person to chat with on the coach ride back, which was a perfectly marvelous ending to an excellent day!
The "Super K Sonic Booooum" was indeed quite aesthetic and impressive.
acelightning is correct in saying that this is a great way to share some sense of Super-Kamiokande's grandeur with the world. I agree wholeheartedly! Still, as my darling tawneypup noted, it does not hold a candle to the real thing. She is absolutely right. Here is a shot of me in the actual Super-Kamiokande:The "Super K Sonic Booooum" may not measure up to my first [physics] love... but it was still an experience unlike any other that I have had in my professional life! I count myself as lucky to be in England and working on neutrino physics at the same time that this independent project -- the first of its kind that I have ever heard of -- sprang up!
[*] In my previous entry, I mistakenly spelled the name of the exhibit with a "boom" rather than a "booooum". Mea culpa. On the other hand, on the artist's web site, she mistakenly adds an "S" to the front of my boss's last name, deletes the hyphen from Super-K, and never spells out the full name of the experiment. Also, she erroneously states that Super-Kamiokande contains 50,000 tonnes of heavy water, which it does not. SK uses ultra-pure water made from ordinary water. The cost of fifty kilotonnes of heavy water (D2O) would be about $15 billion... and I'm not even sure that there is that much heavy water stockpiled on the planet! All in all, then, if we can forgive her these mistakes, I'm sure Nelly can forgive my misspelling of her installation!
[**] Nelly is the artist.
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