Physics is Fun

I titled this post after the text book beloved of physics teachers when I was being taught in the 70's. I still have the book, but haven't looked at it for decades. I still agree that physics is a wonderful subject.

Kamioka Observatory is an inter-university facility with a large experimental physics laboratory located 1,000m underground in Kamioka-mine in Hida-city, Gifu, Japan. Super-Kamiokande is a 50,000 ton water Cherenkov detector and primarily observes the elementary particles known as neutrinos. The Super-K neutrino observatory was simulated in an old lab in Manchester as part of the science festival. 

For a modest fee, I was dressed up in white papery suit, enormous wellies, hard hat and found myself struggling to clamber into a wee boat

The 22m boat journey is guided by a physicist talking about the neutrino mine in Japan and the fact that 50bn of these things are making their way through my thumb at any one time and a whole lot of other information, particularly about dark matter. The boat is pulled to one end of a gold balloon lined tank, then pulled back again with appropriate sonic boom that occurs when these particles move faster than the speed of light.

I clambered out again, stripped off the wellies, hat and suit and went off to listen to a lecture and watch the live feed from Japan showing a spike in a chart when neutrino's were caught.

The lecture covered the usual information about particle physics to a level I am familiar with but completely unable to explain. But the essential point is that neutrinos, previously thought to be massless, have finite masses, thus expanding theories about particle physics and anti-matter, dark matter and black holes.

In another room, the Pressure Company had set up their musical Bunsen pyrophone. This contraption worked by pressing buttons to make the Bunsens flare and create sound. A certain amount of faith is needed to believe this could be an entirely pleasureable musical experience but it was definitely great fun to play with.

 
Anyway, I expect Sig Other to get pedantic about all the physics mistakes in this post, and I'll have to come back and rewrite it so it is more accurate. He seems not to share my view that anarchists don't have to follow the laws of physics.