Fieldwork for the Science Museum

This week I've been trying to fix a big spark chamber for the Science Museum with the precious help of Prof. Websdale. On the picture you can see him installing a scintillator on top of the chamber. I'm happy he accepted to help me because he used to build such devices in the past. I belong to the generation of particle physicist who remotely log on to a detector when it doesn't work and debug it by looking at the logfiles. In this case we use screwdrivers, a voltmeter and an oscilloscope. Something quite unusual for me...

I'm doing this because the I am LHCb-UK Outreach coordinator. As such I am supposed to coordinate the outreach activities in the UK of the LHCb experiment, i.e. explain to the average UK citizen what LHCb is doing. Since LHCb has very little manpower (to be taken as an euphemism) available for such activities there's hardly anything done. Please don't visit the public LHCb web-site, it's such a shame.

Yet as a CERN experiment we should devote part of our efforts explaining to the public what we are doing and why. CERN itself is an open laboratory with a quite decent public web-site.

What is more important in my activity as outreach coordinator is that I am part of the larger group of people who try to promote the LHC in the UK. What for? might you think, we have nothing to sell so why bother making an advertising campaign. That's the subtle difference between marketing and outreach. The UK taxpayers pay about £60M a year as a contribution to CERN and that's not counting what is paid to the research groups in the UK (my salary for instance). Some consider this as a contribution to culture: it's the price for increasing our understanding of Nature. Some might consider it as a long term investment in the future. Our economy is presently growing on the grounds laid during the first half of the past century, when quantum mechanics was developed (think of computers, mobile phones, microwave ovens, lasers...). We might be discovering now what the economy will be based on in 50 years (... or not).

In any case we owe the British public an explanation of what we do with the £1 each taxpayer spends every year to fund our research. We try to have contact with the media, we prepare material for teachers, we have set up a UK website about the LHC (here)... But we first had to find out what to tell the public. The buzzword is Big-Bang: the key message is that we are recreating the conditions of the Big-Bang in the laboratory. If you are interested in the details look at the result of the formative evaluation.

This message will also be central at the upcoming exhibition about the LHC at the Science Museum, for which I am part of the advisory panel. The exhibition will start in April and I am of course not supposed to tell you what it will show. Come and see it. There will for sure be a post here about its opening.

In order to show particles to the public the Science Museum wanted to have a "Cosmic Ray Detector" on display, a device that would show the path of cosmic rays. After some research I found out that they already had one, which Imperial College and Rutherford laboratory built for them some time ago, but that it was probably labeled "Spark Chamber" in their stores. They indeed managed to find it and now we are trying to get it operational.

Stay tuned, hopefully I'll soon be able to add another post about the successful outcome of this fieldwork.