About a month ago, some typical rainy weather joined me as I set forth on the first day of my physics PhD. It started with the regulars: finding places, meeting people, making passwords, learning how to lift a box... then it really started. Like the blood on the bleeding walls of The Amityville Horror movie, the physics started oozing out. It oozes out thick and fast. The duty of the PhD student is to soak up as much physics as they can, construct it into some sort of original research and still be moderately sane as they tuck themselves into bed at night. It's a hard task. The PhD is three years long and, so far, it seems as though I need to be constantly running to finish in time.
Bleeding walls and physics in the Amityville Horror.
Madness
My weekly timetable has developed itself into a medley of madness. I have meetings, seminars and lectures to attend. Then I teach undergraduates, mark their assignments, then do my own assignments. This is followed by the all important reading, researching and running simulations. That's why I'm still doing it at nine o'clock at night, flicking through articles or logged into the computer cluster. Speaking of which, if you're a Chromebook user, this SSH client extension will wake you from your nightmare and let you SSH. I was given a lot of advice on how to manage my time. Unfortunately all the advice was the same monotonous drone "read a book called 'How to Get a PhD', by Phillips and Pugh".
SSH on a Chromebook.
How to Get a PhD
Despite the name, which feels a little patronising, the book can be really helpful. It has some various tips and instructions on how to manage your research, what to expect of others, getting offered places and so on. Although you can figure out a lot of it yourself, it's much easier to just read it and save your valuable time and brain power. BRAAAAINS! Of course there's a reason I'm writing this, a Google search revealed that you can download the entire book for free from here!
The End, or is it?
It's that time of year when some of us start to think long and hard about what we're going to carve into a pumpkin. This year, if I don't carve something epic, I want to see something epic. Something physics-epic. Although this one was interesting, I'm not sure why the Einstein vacuum field equations were carved into a it...
The moderately hungover first years were blissfully unaware of what I was about to tell them. For the past month I have been teaching undergraduate classical mechanics and this week I made an announcement. An announcement of the 2013 physics Nobel Prize winners. In an attempt of dramatics, I also told the tale of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, for it was Peter Higgs and FrançoisEnglert who won the 2013 Nobel prize. Both for their work on the theory of the elusive boson that usually goes by the name of the Higgs boson.
A Belgian Boson
I was first told about the Belgian physicists Robert Brout and FrançoisEnglert, by another Belgian physicist. In a flag waving moment, it was explained to me that Belgians exclusively call the Higgs boson the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson. The reason for this is that the mentioned Belgian duo invented and published the theory, independent of Higgs, only a few months before Higgs himself had. The duos' article can be found here, have a browse, it's in English. Unfortunately, Robert Brout died in 2011. He never got to witness the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson discovery at ATLAS last year, and as for the Nobel prize, well, you kind-of sort-of have to be alive for that...
The Standard Model
The discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson has been said to be one of the final pieces for the Standard Model of physics. This Standard Model is an attempt of a theory of everything - one theory that can explain every bit of physics. The Standard Model has proven to be highly successful, but it still doesn't play well with gravity. But, that doesn't hinder CERN's love of the standard model. They have it's main equation carved into stone:
The SM set in stone at CERN.
In honour of Brout, Englert, Higg and the Standard Model, here are some resources to check out the (Brout-Englert)-Higgs boson and the Standard Model.
Some Video Tape
To start light and short and at the Cranium level, MinutePhysics has a video about the (Brout-Englert)-Higgs boson (below), and about a theory of every thing (here).
Now to jump up in level to a Tibia / Mandible level for my favourite resource: PIRSA. Here's the link to the 2011 Standard Model course by Philip Schuster and Natalia Toro. I chose this year because I've watched every video from it, and they were rather epic.
The Standard Model as the Perimeter Institute sees it.
Some Notes
Staying at the Tibia / Mandible level, these notes are from a series of postgraduate lecture courses, by Professor Wing of UCL.
Alternatively, these ones from the University of Virginia, by Ivo van Vulpen, are more related to the Higgs boson: The Standard Model Higgs Boson.
The above two notes are the forte of this post. You don't need to use both, however, just the one that works best for you.
Previous Particle Post
A while ago I wrote an intro to particle physics post - The Particle Have Landed. The videos at the end are where I'm particularly wanting to point you, right now.
