Thanksgiving, spaceship shaped cookies and an existential crisis...

It’s just started snowing here. And by snowing, I mean we’ve had as much snow as the UK gets in a year in about four hours. Getting to class tomorrow could be fun…

Anyways, last week was one of the most important event s of the American calendar, Thanksgiving.  The origins of thanksgiving are a mix of traditions, but for the most part it’s a celebration of when the Pilgrims landed in America and celebrated their harvest festival, which they combined with that of the Native Americans, to thank God for guiding them safely across the Atlantic. This event was pretty much the start of the true colonisation of North America by Europeans.  It became a proper national holiday in the American Civil War.

Of course, the colonisation of the US also led to the near extinction of the Native Americans, which is why my suitemate refers to it as Genocide Day…but in the interest of being nice I’ll brush over that for now!

Nowadays it’s a four day holiday from Thursday (Thanksgiving Day itself) to Sunday. Many students here decided to in fact make it a five day holiday, so my classes on Wednesday were strangely empty. My geology professor decided that those who turned up would get to write two of the question for the final exam, so it was worth getting up for.

Then on Wednesday evening I left the empty halls and went to stay with Allegra, one of my friends from church and her family. Allegra and another of my friends, Dan, have, for some reason, decided that they are my divorced parents fighting for custody over me, so are sharing me in the various holidays. Slightly worrying, but at least I have places to stay…

Thursday morning started with a parade in Detroit (we watched it on tv), which shared the usual American attribute of being huge and over the top, with vast, very well built floats.  Next came the Thanksgiving football game. There are two of these, which always involve the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys against someone. Apparently the Lions always loose, which they did again this year. Still not sure if I like American football or not.         

The main event of Thanksgiving is of course food on Thursday evening, for which turkey is eaten. Surprisingly the traditional Christmas meal is, like ours, also turkey, so they have turkey sandwiches for two months in a row instead of our one… anyway it was a very nice meal. There were quite a few people there, as an important part of thanksgiving is that it’s a family celebration. Many people take the day off and travel to be with their families, which can be quite a way with a country the size of the US! This can of course lead to travel chaos, but it seems to have been ok this year.

I think by far the question was asked the most was “do you have a thanksgiving?” On first view an odd question, but the celebration has moved on from its historical origins. I’ve been asked quite a lot of questions like this about how Britain views or knows about various American traditions. I’m still waiting for “Do you celebrate Independence Day?” But no we don’t have a thanksgiving, on account of being a proper old country rather than a colony with ideas above its station (I didn’t say that).

After the meal I went to investigate another bit of American culture, the infamous Black Friday.  Yes you’ve read that right, it’s still Thursday.

Black Friday is the first day of the Christmas shopping season, and many shops put on very good deals on electronics, clothing, toys and other stuff. People (I am not making this stuff up) regularly camp for day or days to be the first in the doors to get all of the on-offer stuff before they sell out. Shops have opened at four am before, and this year it got even worse, with many places opening at midnight and some, including Wal-Mart, opening at ten on Thursday evening.  It was decided I needed to experience this, so off we went to have a look.  

It was an interesting experience. Consumerism distilled was how I would describe it. Locusts were the metaphor someone else used. I think he may have been closer to the truth- no sooner would a trolley of stuff on offer be wheeled out than a horde of shoppers would descend on it, stripping it bare in under a minute. Unfortunately the Lego wasn’t on offer so I came away empty handed.

So waking up quite late the next day we started making cookies, leading to various arguments about the need for precision in measuring ingredients. (I’m sure the “some” is a perfectly acceptable unit of measurement, as in “add some flour, some sugar, etc.) It was then that I was made to feel old.

Plans to watch the new dvd Allegra had bought were stymied when we discovered that one of the  (twenty million) film channels was showing all three The Lord of the Rings films back to back.  The reason? It was ten years last weekend since the first one was released. That’s really scary. Something that had a fairly big impact on my life was ten years ago. Oo er…

We resisted watching them all, Allegra’s dad and I gamely staying up until the end of The Two Towers at two am, but fortunately they were repeated all weekend so we just watched The Return of the King that evening. Ten hours well spent.  

On Sunday we went to the oldest Methodist Church in continuous use in Michigan, a title that the quality of the service unfortunately didn’t live up to. Fortunately Allegra’s family agreed with me that it had been a fairly rubbish service.  I was volunteered to read something about the advent colours, for which I got nice comments about how good a speaker I am. Those comments do slightly worry me though- were you listening to what I was actually saying?   

That afternoon “dad” (Dan) turned up to help us frost the cookies. This was taken rather less seriously by two of us, leading to very large number of green snowmen with orange spots, a farmyard scene on a star, and my epic discovery that if you turned a Santa-shaped cookie on it’s side it looked like Serenity.  

After that we came back to MSU, stopping on the way to go to a Taco Bell, which I was assured was another essential American experience. In my, er, experience people only use the words “essential experience” to describe something when there’s nothing better to say about it…

So that was thanksgiving. The snow is now slowly climbing up the walls. Goodbye…

Modern physics is basically taking stuff we do know about and smashing it into stuff we don't know about...

Sorry about the delay, but I forgot to talk about something, so I decided to wait until I did something else and put it in with that. If that makes sense…

So a couple of weeks ago I finally had a look round the building I walk past every day. The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.

After, and in many ways because of, the second world war there was a huge increase in physics research in America and Europe. However they differed in the way they decided to organise this new research. Europe, centralised it’s research into laboratories and institutions that scientists from many different universities could come to. America on the other hand decided that it’s research would be, for the most part, done at the universities.

This is why we have one of the top three labs of its kind in the world. The lab is used to search for different atomic nuclei, trying to create new and more interesting isotopes of atoms. (An isotope is an element with the same amount of protons but different amounts of neutrons. For example carbon 12, with six protons and six neutrons, is the same element as carbon 14, six protons and eight neutrons, but a different isotope).  The method used is quite long and complex, so I’ll just talk about the basics.

The main part, and the part that gives the lab it’s name, is the superconducting cyclotrons.  These are giant cylindrical chambers, six stories high, which use electrical and magnetic fields to accelerate atoms up to significant fractions of the speed of light. They are then sent through a long tube and smashed into a target, which will cause different elements and isotopes to be formed. The debris from the collision is then sent though several bends to try to get rid of any unwanted isotopes then directed into a detector, which will see if the isotope they are aiming for has been found.

The advantages of having this on campus are huge. There are over four hundred people working there, many of the students. Undergrad students here have a unique opportunity to actually be involved in research form the word go, and even if they don’t work there they can benefit from all to the world class researcher that are coming through all of the time. They help plan the experiments, build the detectors and analyse the results.  This hands on experience has led to MSU being the number one university for nuclear physics in the USA, even beating MIT. Please take notice, Britain.

Not that it really affects me of course as I’m an astrophysicist. But this theme of having the research on campus does, as we also have the control room for the SOAR telescope here- I’m hoping to have a go with this at some point, so more on that to come…  

Overall it was a very interesting tour and I learned quite a bit about the actual logistics of doing research like that.  And there was the point where the tour guide said “and this part can be used for astro research.” I may well be heading back there at some point.

Talking of learning stuff, I did my second Science Theatre last night. This time it was doubly interesting as we were performing for a Cub Scout group. I’m an assistant cub leader at home, and it was good to se how there was of doing things compared with ours. I would say that they were somewhat more…old fashioned than us, but not that different. The show was fun, and as usual they were very keen for me to injure myself, this time by dropping a weight on my foot.

Anyway that’s it for now, but come back soon- the next few days are a holiday for thanksgiving, so I’m fairly sure I’ll have plenty to talk about on Monday .