I hope we don’t find the Higgs

As I said yesterday, there are rumours that the Higgs particle may have already been spotted at the Tevatron thus rendering LHC at CERN a tad redundant, but what is the Higgs anyway? Basically the Higgs particle is the last particle predicted by the Standard Model. The Standard Model being the particle physics theory that …

Dear Friend, I write to you in closest confidence. This morning while leaving the house I made a most marvelous discovery. Upon setting foot outside my front door I was buffeted and pushed around by an invisible force. Now being a God-fearing man I at first assumed the rapture was upon us and the end …

*BOOM* A tale of woe.

It has been said that young amateur scientists typically fall into one of four categories: those trying to make explosives, those with an interest in electronics, astronomers and those that like to take dead animals apart. I didn’t fit the classification so well, I had an active interest in all of those things. It was …

Happiness is a warm gun hot soldering iron.

Things are getting along quite well in the new lab. Large pieces of aluminium have been turned into small pieces of aluminium (and a lot of swarf), spectrometers have been upgraded and calibrated, and I’ve just finished building some constant current regulators for low currents. The current regulators don’t work how I thought they should, …