What does it mean to dump the beam?
A few hours after I inadvertently crashed the LHC (see previous post) I went back to celebrate CERN’s (and the world’s) highest luminosity on record, 100 inverse femtobarns, which means 100 billion protons sent around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC every 25 nanoseconds. As Mike Lamont said, this stuff really is crazy! I felt a bit weird and guilty returning to the scene of the crime so to speak. But when i arrived the beam was ramping up again and there was a Swiss style party in full swing! The aftermath equals the after party. Where’s the cheese? I got a high-five from Mike, so the experiment seems to have worked!
Even though my “irregular” beam dump was not directly my fault, it was ultimately caused by me. As I asked Mike, if I had flipped that switch a second or even a millisecond later, that one stray proton flying out from the beam probably / probabilistically would not have occurred. But it did, which flipped a bit in a control chip (showing the materiality of data), which created a cascade of errors and the subsequent shutdown of the LHC (and just before the party!). This made me think of the threefold / three way relationship between human, machine and quantum. As I said to Mike, it all goes down to quantum phenomena and the stochastic uniqueness of such events, and the effects they have on both apparatuses and humans. All this from a flick of a switch – is this my first real artwork since commencing my ANAT fellowship here?
And now as I look out the CERN hostel window, a shadow seems to shadow hanging over me – the shadow of Shiva / Natraj, doing the dance of creation and destruction. I had a strange kind of nightmare where I was trying to explain the philosophy of physics to a bunch of disgruntled people, whilst a heavy metal band was playing at a deafening level behind me. And this is not the first nightmare I’ve had about this place – the first time I came here I had a dream where I was trapped in the labyrinth of labs, then finally escaped to find myself in another dimension full of Durga Demons. (there’s no AI on this blog, but he is a link to an AI thing I did (but it’s OK because it was years ago) – the CERN Shiva dream.