I have a serious problem with the way we conduct science today, especially in particle physics the method is broken in order to feed our industry of “productivity”.
Teaching math and programming
How to teach the tools of science (and modern society as a whole) is something that interests me a great deal. Conrad Wolfram (the brother of Steven Wolfram) discusses in the following TED talk how to change the way we teach mathematics in school into something more relevant than brute computation.
Re-programming your wetware
Perhaps more meta, than physics, this post summarises a few ideas that are becoming increasingly important to me as I grow older.
Being self-aware in the “western” sense, begins at puberty. Ones outer representation becomes important, and the unworried inner voice starts acting in new and sometimes cruel ways. While this is a self-correcting mechanism allowing the individual to “fit” within a larger social circle, it also undermines the “self”, by imposing social norms instead of the natural behaviour of humans.
In this post I will consider three cases, where adults tend to be dominated by their social adaptations, leading to stress, mental discourse and fatigue.
All three cases are purely socially induced “mis-management” of ones mental state, and can be remedied by simple techniques.
Illustrating hypothesis testing
Code for plotting two distributions with a test statistic cut and errors of the first and second kind, marked.
Combining Unbiased but Correlated Estimators
If a measurement of some quantity, the length of a table, the temperature of a fluid etc. can be done in more than one way, one have the problem of estimating the best value by the set of estimates available.
If for instance we had three rulers of different brands and measured the long side of a table with these, could we just take the geometric average 
Bioluminescence – or why night walking is a wonderful thing
I’m spending a few days at my parents house in Ebeltoft, tonight I went outside for a short walk (around 2:00 AM) and the pitch black darkness took me by surprise, normally the neighborhood is illuminated, but due to energy conservation they now turn off the street lamps at 1:00 AM. A dark moonless night, not a wind and a thought too many to process drove me down to the sea. I sat down in the sand and began to relax a bit. At some point I put my glasses on again, after having deemed them rather useless in the dark night. What I first saw was the still water – not a single wave, the city on the other side of the shore shawn over the water with a near-perfect reflection. After sitting there for a while I noticed small flashes of light. I first mistook these lights for small ripples on the water catching the city light, but I soon noticed that these glimpses came from somewhere else entirely, and what was a calming night became one of the most wonderful experiences in my life.
Particle Physics – an Introduction
The introductory chapter of what is to become my thesis on the search for new stable massive particles at the LHC.
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”
- Stephen Hawking
Introduction
Particle physics is the study of energy and matter at its most fundamental level. The Universe – much like a hot gas cooling to a liquid and on to a solid form, underwent phase transitions leading to the matter and forces dominating today. With ever-increasing accelerator energies we can rewind the clock and gradually look back in time to try and rediscover these early phases of the Universe just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The Universe at that time consisted of particles very different from today, and other forces where dominant.
By accelerating charged particles in electric fields we can propel them to speeds close to that of light. Because these particles have mass, they can never move as fast as light due to Einstein’s Special theory of Relativity (SR), instead their “relativistic” mass increases, and by colliding these particles together new types of particles with masses as large as the sum of the relativistic masses can be created. It is these new heavier particles that resembles those of the early universe, and is of interest to modern physics. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland is currently the largest and most powerful accelerator facility for this line of research. The LHC is a ring of super-conducting magnets, 27 km in circumference, capable of accelerating protons to an energy of 
Programming for first graders
During the last hundred years literacy have rocketed up, affecting both the power balance, the industrial output and our lives in general. In this article I will argue that Programming as a general skill has become what reading and writing were before the great literacy revolution of the nineteenth century.
