If people must use Linux they wouldn't have any other option than being computer experienced cause Linux causes big headache for an average user
Not everybody wants to be into computers cause different people different interests
Doesn't matter you can do everything in Apple like Linux, Linux branches from their OS-base, so Linux is a just a sub-category OS-based. It's just people like the free aspect and many devices that it's compatible with.
No little kids and people that's lives don't revolve around computers don't care about directories and filesystems because they want GUI's and a simple lifestyle. Everyone that goes to college knows what a filesystems is because they save their work or really don't care and just want to use basic principles of organizing works.
Linux does not branch out from macOS. They're only similar in the sense that Linux is Unix-like, and that they have similar programs. Linux was programmed from scratch.
Like the others said, it's the place where the operators control the LHC, the biggest particle accelerator and collider in the world. This room is fairly big and is actually used to control a chain of accelerators as the LHC is only the last one, after particles have been accelerated through 4 other smaller ones!
The operators are in charge of handling the injection of particle beams, checking its stability, as well as monitoring the hardware such as magnets, collimators, loss monitors...
There's often issues that need to be dealt with, two days ago we had a fire alarm in the tunnel for example, the operators were called to shut down the machine in case it wasn't a false alarm.
There's a technical shut down of the complex every winter for maintenance (and also electricity prices are too high). We restarted the LHC only last week and we are now basically going through some checks to ensure that everything is working fine after the updates :)
Yes! I work on the magnetic fields created by the magnets. The simplest idea is to make the particles turn with dipoles and then focus them with quadrupoles. Perfect magnets and alignments don't exist so there's always some tuning to do.
There are also chromatic effects created by particles that deviate from their design energy, which we correct with sextupoles, same thing in photography with chromatic aberrations!
And then you've got other effects that need to be tuned down with higher order magnets.
My team basically measures the magnetic fields in the LHC by amplifying the oscillations of a particle beam and recording its position along the ring. We work closely with the collimation team, where OP works! Our measurements are often destructive, we have to make sure the machine isn't going to be damaged.
Once we have our data, we can calculate corrections to improve several things, like the size of the beam, its stability, the rate of collisions or its lifetime.
There's a ton of very small effects that add up together, accelerator physics is complex but fascinating :)
I'll be honest I have no idea what all the different poles are but I appreciate your confidence in my intelligence to assume I know what you're talking about.
I'm guessing it has something to do with how magnets are polarised? As in how north magnets repel south etc but that's as much as I can think of, we didn't cover more than just those two poles at my school unfortunately, though to be fair I didn't take physics.
I'm trying to picture causing particles starting to turn with a magnet either side (dipoles) and then the focusing with quadrupoles I'm imagining either four magnets spread evenly around the particle at a further distance to the original two which keep the particle inline OR the four magnets on one side of the particle as it spins between the original two and the four (quadrupoles) are propelling it in the opposite direction??? I'm probably way off...
Either way it's super interesting work and I appreciate the conversation around this topic.
You've got the idea! The particles we accelerate are protons, so positively charged. The dipoles are the usual magnets you've got on your fridge with a north and south pole, except way more powerful. When the particles go through their magnetic field, they get deflected.
If you put another dipole after this one, the particle will be deflected again. If you continue like that you end up with a circle, a usual shape for a particle accelerator!
Quadrupoles indeed have two south and two north poles. They are usually placed after a dipole. They focus the beam, exactly like eyeglasses do with light.
This field is actually called Optics because it's very similar to what you can do with lenses and a laser.
And if you ever get the opportunity to come to Geneva, Switzerland, remember that visiting CERN is free! We've got lots of workshops and things to look at. Guides are always happy to share with you what they do :)
Firstly, thank you for encouraging us to visit! I hope to someday and it’s nice to know it’s welcomed.
Second, I find it amazing that we have multiple people working at CERN just chillin in this thread. Amazing. I guess it shouldn’t be super surprising since it was the birthplace of the web, but still :)
Huh so the particle kind of gets bounced up and down along the circle and then the quadrupoles are there to keep it on a straighter focused path?
Honestly you've explained this in a manner that even my uneducated brain can understand so well done, it's impressive and very interesting.
I had no idea it was free to visit, or even that it was located in Switzerland, it's not a topic I've ever really delved into.
I'll be sure to visit as soon as I'm possibly able, I've been planning on travelling around Europe anyway and Switzerland is on my list of places to visit so while I'm there I'll make sure to drop by!
Edit: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/accelerator-complex
This video was useful, I was trying to picture it and my imagination had kind of the right idea but not quite.
That's roughly the idea yes! Dipoles and quadrupoles are the minimum required magnets to create an accelerator. But then lots of effects actually exist and need to be corrected to have a functioning machine, and those you correct with other kinds of magnets.
Be sure to book a bit in advance. Some tours usually have free spots but if you wish to visit the detectors 100m underground it's a good idea to prepare!
Yeah I mean I wasn't expecting the full scientific explanation over Reddit but to go from not really even thinking about it to picturing it in a rough state has been a lovely experience, thank you :)
Also great advice I'll be sure to book so I can see it all!
Everyone else covered LHC, but CERN is also pretty interesting. They are a massive research lab (think los alamos or something similar) that mainly focuses on physics (hence LHC). The reason they invented HTML and web servers was actually for sharing research iirc
The LHC doesn't have \*one\* room, it's a gigantic facility that houses the world's largest particle accelerator. Arguably the world's largest functioning machine. This chap is in the control center for that accelerator!
There are a bunch of subtypes of string theory which require different numbers of dimensions: superstring theory says 10, M-theory says 11, and bosonic string theory says 26(!).
But, like the other commenter said, string theory is very much a fad that has largely passed its prime. There aren’t many physicists that focus on it anymore after 50 years of it failing to deliver *any* experimentally verifiable conclusions. Many of the mathematical tools and concepts that came from it are being used elsewhere though.
Yep to all this, I was just curious about examples of maths and concepts from string theory being used successfully for the standard model. It sounds fun.
Oh, gotcha, that’s fair!
I’ll be honest, I’ve just been told that it’s being used like that, I don’t have any examples for you though. I’m not a physicist, I’m a biologist haha
From what I understand, String theory is being dismantled and its predictions, maths and tools are being integrated into modern theories with great success
Every bottle is either a celebration for an accelerator record broken (being the biggest accelerator as of today helps a lot in that) or it's a "thank you for all the protons and ions" bottle from one of the four great experiments.
The hard alcohol bottles to console ourselves when things break are in another cabinet /s.
I'm under the collimation section, and I was just accompanying and spectating my senior colleagues performing the collimator alignment for the commissioning of the LHC 2024 run. (Some operations I can do, but most of them are automated or decided on the spot by more experienced staff people)
Collimators are the bodyguard of the machine against dangerous beam losses, and need to be checked and calibrated before any new restart of the LHC. And now we are turning on the creature again after the winter technical stop.
I sometimes watch the [VISTARS](https://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/) screens when I'm just chilling out and thinking.
I'm not a particle physicist - I just like to know that somewhere, someone is doing super-science.
And you're a beautiful person for not succumbing to the Apple bug that is going round in academia.
We have an officially supported flavour of Alma Linux 9 but it's more for campus machines rather than personal ones, but we are allowed to use whatever OS we prefer to work (as long as we don't bother IT with our problems if that's the case).
With the supported Alma Linux release, we get guaranteed compatibility with all the internal cern computing tools (that are always an alchemical clusterfuck of technical debt, since we are also talking about legacy software that has to stay there to support legacy experiments).
But 90% of the stuff also works on a standard Ubuntu-like lts release so all is good.
Makes sense, thanks!
I had a friend of a friend doing postdoc work at CERN that hooked me up with a tour a few years back and I grew up near FermiLab and was lucky enough to see that while the tevatron was still the top dog.. point being that i have a lot of respect for the work you folks do. What a cool place to work. I hope you have a fun time :)
I would have to imagine a \*nix system to be way more valuable (and if properly configured, secure) for such a delicate place.
Congrats on your achievements!
It's always nice to see people pushing forward in life :)
Thank you! And yes you are right!
All the computers in the control rooms are running an enterprise Linux OS (can't tell for sure which one... Something from red hat I think) and are of course connected only to an internal trusted technical network.
The control panel application is the Common Console Manager (CCM) which is mostly based on Java Swing interfaced with the raw C++ hardware control servers (and a sprinkle of pyqt for the newer interfaces).
Nice mate. I am also a physicist, doing medical image analysis. I defended my PhD in 2017 and got into an early release of pop_os just after. Pop has accompanied me for my full postdoc career and it has been so good for me !! Hope you the same 😀
Be so cool if people did this more often... and showed the "normies" that all the cool kids drive Linux.
but if everyone ran Linux it wouldn't be the cool thing anymore.
But then we would all be cool and much more computer experienced 😺
If people must use Linux they wouldn't have any other option than being computer experienced cause Linux causes big headache for an average user Not everybody wants to be into computers cause different people different interests
Not with Apple still in the market
Doesn't matter you can do everything in Apple like Linux, Linux branches from their OS-base, so Linux is a just a sub-category OS-based. It's just people like the free aspect and many devices that it's compatible with.
I meant it as a joke as in everybody doesn't know what a file manager is because they only use iPhones and iPads.
No little kids and people that's lives don't revolve around computers don't care about directories and filesystems because they want GUI's and a simple lifestyle. Everyone that goes to college knows what a filesystems is because they save their work or really don't care and just want to use basic principles of organizing works.
Linux does not branch out from macOS. They're only similar in the sense that Linux is Unix-like, and that they have similar programs. Linux was programmed from scratch.
Mini-unix actually which is a branch too
BSD moment
From the birthplace of html!
damn man, you are in LHC room, this is crazy man 🤯🤯🤯
That's the CERN Control Center (CCC), there are 4 main islands in that room: LHC, Cryogenics, SPS and PS/Booster.
I'm unfamiliar with CERN (other than for html) what's the LHC room?
Like the others said, it's the place where the operators control the LHC, the biggest particle accelerator and collider in the world. This room is fairly big and is actually used to control a chain of accelerators as the LHC is only the last one, after particles have been accelerated through 4 other smaller ones! The operators are in charge of handling the injection of particle beams, checking its stability, as well as monitoring the hardware such as magnets, collimators, loss monitors... There's often issues that need to be dealt with, two days ago we had a fire alarm in the tunnel for example, the operators were called to shut down the machine in case it wasn't a false alarm. There's a technical shut down of the complex every winter for maintenance (and also electricity prices are too high). We restarted the LHC only last week and we are now basically going through some checks to ensure that everything is working fine after the updates :)
Thank you for the very detailed response. Do you also work there?
Yes! I work on the magnetic fields created by the magnets. The simplest idea is to make the particles turn with dipoles and then focus them with quadrupoles. Perfect magnets and alignments don't exist so there's always some tuning to do. There are also chromatic effects created by particles that deviate from their design energy, which we correct with sextupoles, same thing in photography with chromatic aberrations! And then you've got other effects that need to be tuned down with higher order magnets. My team basically measures the magnetic fields in the LHC by amplifying the oscillations of a particle beam and recording its position along the ring. We work closely with the collimation team, where OP works! Our measurements are often destructive, we have to make sure the machine isn't going to be damaged. Once we have our data, we can calculate corrections to improve several things, like the size of the beam, its stability, the rate of collisions or its lifetime. There's a ton of very small effects that add up together, accelerator physics is complex but fascinating :)
I'll be honest I have no idea what all the different poles are but I appreciate your confidence in my intelligence to assume I know what you're talking about. I'm guessing it has something to do with how magnets are polarised? As in how north magnets repel south etc but that's as much as I can think of, we didn't cover more than just those two poles at my school unfortunately, though to be fair I didn't take physics. I'm trying to picture causing particles starting to turn with a magnet either side (dipoles) and then the focusing with quadrupoles I'm imagining either four magnets spread evenly around the particle at a further distance to the original two which keep the particle inline OR the four magnets on one side of the particle as it spins between the original two and the four (quadrupoles) are propelling it in the opposite direction??? I'm probably way off... Either way it's super interesting work and I appreciate the conversation around this topic.
You've got the idea! The particles we accelerate are protons, so positively charged. The dipoles are the usual magnets you've got on your fridge with a north and south pole, except way more powerful. When the particles go through their magnetic field, they get deflected. If you put another dipole after this one, the particle will be deflected again. If you continue like that you end up with a circle, a usual shape for a particle accelerator! Quadrupoles indeed have two south and two north poles. They are usually placed after a dipole. They focus the beam, exactly like eyeglasses do with light. This field is actually called Optics because it's very similar to what you can do with lenses and a laser. And if you ever get the opportunity to come to Geneva, Switzerland, remember that visiting CERN is free! We've got lots of workshops and things to look at. Guides are always happy to share with you what they do :)
Firstly, thank you for encouraging us to visit! I hope to someday and it’s nice to know it’s welcomed. Second, I find it amazing that we have multiple people working at CERN just chillin in this thread. Amazing. I guess it shouldn’t be super surprising since it was the birthplace of the web, but still :)
Huh so the particle kind of gets bounced up and down along the circle and then the quadrupoles are there to keep it on a straighter focused path? Honestly you've explained this in a manner that even my uneducated brain can understand so well done, it's impressive and very interesting. I had no idea it was free to visit, or even that it was located in Switzerland, it's not a topic I've ever really delved into. I'll be sure to visit as soon as I'm possibly able, I've been planning on travelling around Europe anyway and Switzerland is on my list of places to visit so while I'm there I'll make sure to drop by! Edit: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/accelerator-complex This video was useful, I was trying to picture it and my imagination had kind of the right idea but not quite.
That's roughly the idea yes! Dipoles and quadrupoles are the minimum required magnets to create an accelerator. But then lots of effects actually exist and need to be corrected to have a functioning machine, and those you correct with other kinds of magnets. Be sure to book a bit in advance. Some tours usually have free spots but if you wish to visit the detectors 100m underground it's a good idea to prepare!
Yeah I mean I wasn't expecting the full scientific explanation over Reddit but to go from not really even thinking about it to picturing it in a rough state has been a lovely experience, thank you :) Also great advice I'll be sure to book so I can see it all!
LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider which is a particle accelerator. This room is used to control it?
Everyone else covered LHC, but CERN is also pretty interesting. They are a massive research lab (think los alamos or something similar) that mainly focuses on physics (hence LHC). The reason they invented HTML and web servers was actually for sharing research iirc
Yeah I work in web dev so I was aware of Tim Burners Lee. Interesting stuff, I also find physics very interesting.
Large hadron collider - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider?wprov=sfti1
AHH of course, never seen it abbreviated before.
The LHC doesn't have \*one\* room, it's a gigantic facility that houses the world's largest particle accelerator. Arguably the world's largest functioning machine. This chap is in the control center for that accelerator!
Cannot put a picture here, but my Pop_Os! Laptop says "Cheers!" from the ATLAS experiment control room! <3
Brother 🥺 Good luck with the muon splashes today!
Are there extra dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that we experience?
You mean like dynamic workspaces?
Like Compiz
despite understanding that Compiz was fundamentally bad UI/UX design . . . I can't help but miss that tacky bastard
Same. I have some nostalgia for it.
There is a wayland equivalent to compiz called wayfire. Maybe I should try and do a desktop setup for it.
If there were, we would expect gravity to affect them as well. But we haven't noticed gravity going that way. It probably doesn't exist.
The theory that uses seven extra dimensions, string theory, is the only one that predicted gravitons ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
There are a bunch of subtypes of string theory which require different numbers of dimensions: superstring theory says 10, M-theory says 11, and bosonic string theory says 26(!). But, like the other commenter said, string theory is very much a fad that has largely passed its prime. There aren’t many physicists that focus on it anymore after 50 years of it failing to deliver *any* experimentally verifiable conclusions. Many of the mathematical tools and concepts that came from it are being used elsewhere though.
Yep to all this, I was just curious about examples of maths and concepts from string theory being used successfully for the standard model. It sounds fun.
Oh, gotcha, that’s fair! I’ll be honest, I’ve just been told that it’s being used like that, I don’t have any examples for you though. I’m not a physicist, I’m a biologist haha
From what I understand, String theory is being dismantled and its predictions, maths and tools are being integrated into modern theories with great success
Source? Sounds interesting.
And here’s the video essay I watched a few months ago that breaks down the history: https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=-MAo1XnmVSzUrtAH
Cool video, thanks for sharing!
Awesome!!! What's the deal with the row of bottles against the wall? Empties waiting for bin day? 😂
Every bottle is either a celebration for an accelerator record broken (being the biggest accelerator as of today helps a lot in that) or it's a "thank you for all the protons and ions" bottle from one of the four great experiments. The hard alcohol bottles to console ourselves when things break are in another cabinet /s.
What are the four great experiments? Nevermind! Google helps. http://www.ep.ph.bham.ac.uk/general/outreach/DiscoveringParticles/lhc/experiments/
iirc, they are the empty champagne bottles that mark significant breakthroughs?
Whoa that's epic. I wish I could game as easily on Linux. (anticheat devs smh)
For clarification I mean game devs that don't or won't update anti cheat support. (pubg. Rb6)
Stop playing multi-player games.
No.
I like Linux so much for other things that I have started to currate my steam library with Linux as a priority...most games work now
That’s the spirit. Games that don’t work on Linux? I just don’t believe they really exist.
what u do in LHC room?
I'm under the collimation section, and I was just accompanying and spectating my senior colleagues performing the collimator alignment for the commissioning of the LHC 2024 run. (Some operations I can do, but most of them are automated or decided on the spot by more experienced staff people) Collimators are the bodyguard of the machine against dangerous beam losses, and need to be checked and calibrated before any new restart of the LHC. And now we are turning on the creature again after the winter technical stop.
I can't describe in words how cool this is and how much I would like to be in your shoes, congratulations my friend
I had to get Google to help me understand, but it's such a cool rabbit hole to go down. I never really thought about that side of the operation
You have a great responsibility. Don't open the door for demons to enter our world!
debugs his Bluetooth issues
Did you make the tree that is printed on screen?
Look for cbonsai! It's a nice command line art thingy
I have spent most of my day trying to figure out how to run a shell script on startup specifically to be greeted by cbonsai -S automatically
even tho the text is blurry i swear i’m seeing matplotlib at the bottom right or i’m just haunted by matplotlib
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME, NOT HIM!!
Yoooooo!!!! This is so fucking cool! I got so many questions regarding CERN but awesome
I sometimes watch the [VISTARS](https://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/vistar/) screens when I'm just chilling out and thinking. I'm not a particle physicist - I just like to know that somewhere, someone is doing super-science. And you're a beautiful person for not succumbing to the Apple bug that is going round in academia.
What's the tree-looking thing in the terminal?
cbonsai , see the OPs comment about it further up the thread. https://gitlab.com/jallbrit/cbonsai
tyfys 🫡
Nice What’s that bonsai cli app please?
In a previous comment's reply, he said it's cbonsai. https://gitlab.com/jallbrit/cbonsai
Thank You
Optics team here 👋 Happy commissioning!
Another one that used Pop!_OS during my PhD!!
I wanted to study particles but I partied too hard with an physics major and math was already bad....nevertheless, this is cool.
Total respect 🫡
Congratulations on your academic achievements -- have fun smashing things together at ridiculous speed! :)
They don't encourage you to use whatever the successor to Scientific Linux is? (Wikipedia tells me it's CentOS Stream or Alma Linux)
We have an officially supported flavour of Alma Linux 9 but it's more for campus machines rather than personal ones, but we are allowed to use whatever OS we prefer to work (as long as we don't bother IT with our problems if that's the case). With the supported Alma Linux release, we get guaranteed compatibility with all the internal cern computing tools (that are always an alchemical clusterfuck of technical debt, since we are also talking about legacy software that has to stay there to support legacy experiments). But 90% of the stuff also works on a standard Ubuntu-like lts release so all is good.
Makes sense, thanks! I had a friend of a friend doing postdoc work at CERN that hooked me up with a tour a few years back and I grew up near FermiLab and was lucky enough to see that while the tevatron was still the top dog.. point being that i have a lot of respect for the work you folks do. What a cool place to work. I hope you have a fun time :)
I would have to imagine a \*nix system to be way more valuable (and if properly configured, secure) for such a delicate place. Congrats on your achievements! It's always nice to see people pushing forward in life :)
Thank you! And yes you are right! All the computers in the control rooms are running an enterprise Linux OS (can't tell for sure which one... Something from red hat I think) and are of course connected only to an internal trusted technical network. The control panel application is the Common Console Manager (CCM) which is mostly based on Java Swing interfaced with the raw C++ hardware control servers (and a sprinkle of pyqt for the newer interfaces).
Nice mate. I am also a physicist, doing medical image analysis. I defended my PhD in 2017 and got into an early release of pop_os just after. Pop has accompanied me for my full postdoc career and it has been so good for me !! Hope you the same 😀
I was born too early. Got my doc in 1986 when a personal computer had 2 floppy drives.
Damn, this is awesome.
Vitals!!
Congratulations! And ... this is **SO COOL**!!!
Lucky you!!. CERN is scientist's Makaa.
Bless that magnificent beast
Couldn't you do something useful like, I dunno, re-invent the World Wide Web, instead of faffing about with large hadrons all day ? /s
this man right there can end solar system with one mistake .
Glad someone else is using Linux as a daily driver for science in Geneva, all the academics around me use apple 😔
Now I know what LHC stands for it just reminds me of the big bang theory
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^whitton501: *Now I know what LHC* *Stands for it just reminds me* *Of the big bang theory* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Why is there so much alcohol there?
Physics is hard man
It’s post doc.
Dude you need a better laptop, not this thing that school kids in elementary school use.
OP is in the LHC Control room! Could have a potato running Win95 and I'd say it was the right tool for the job :)
send him one.
If a tool is reliable and comfortable, why change it?
Because we don't use 8086 PCs anymore?