Week 2: Matej & Thanasis

Matej

First “working” step into our collaboration with Thanassis will be an interview which we are planning on doing tomorrow evening. This interview will be posted on SciArt's website. Last week we already did a pre-interview that will help me to formulate relevant questions. I am curious if we could produce a media piece for Thanassis’s planetarium. It will not be a “traditional,” but a rather experimental science fiction piece that would ideally involve data from Thanassis's research on particles produced in stars using particle accelerator - if that would be possible. The idea of a star as a large scale particle factory is fascinating together with molecular self-assembly and the Bolzman's theorem. To create the science-fiction media piece, we will be using different filming, sound, and digital 3D visualization techniques. Now we just have to find the right story. Let the search begin!

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Thanassis

This week I returned back to Hamilton, Ontario after a very busy but exciting and definitely memorable summer. I was away for three and a half months, mainly in Vancouver, where I performed the main experiment of my thesis, and ten days in Munich, Germany for another experiment. During my stay in Vancouver I had the unique opportunity to work in a big laboratory and perform cutting edge research for my project. Beyond that, I had the chance to meet great people and have meaningful conversations. This experience-dense summer makes the perfect set-up to start this collaboration.

Sunset view of the Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany

The experiment at TRIUMF -that's the facility's name- itself went fairly well, despite its complexity, but we will still need to run another time to get a more complete dataset. For two weeks -the length of the experiment- I was sleep deprived and mainly living on snacks in the counting room (I'm sure experimenters will understand that feeling).

The DRAGON (Detector of Recoils And Gammas Of Nuclear reactions) at TRIUMF, Vancouver, Canada.

Couple of days before coming back, and after the experiment was over, we had the second Skype meeting with Matej in which we discussed about the next steps of our collaboration. One of the ideas that came quite naturally during our conversation is the production of a full-dome planetarium show that will be based in one of my live shows called “Star and stardust: The lives of the stars and the origin of the elements”.  

Another option is the production of a sci-fi full dome planetarium show, based on Star Wars – put your lightsabers out Jedi! To that end, we are also thinking of contacting people more experienced in full-dome show production.

During our conversation, I had a rare opportunity to share my thoughts on my research and science in general, because of a Matej's class project. That project was about interviewing a scientist. Actually our conversation served more like a pre-interview, to give Matej an idea on what to ask me on the real one. It was actually a really nice conversation that didn’t seem like an interview – or pre-interview (I'm sure he will mention that in his own post).

To wrap up this week's blog, our collaboration seems to work out perfectly so far. Matej's interest in visualization and computer simulation and mine in nuclear astrophysics and sci-fi, make definitely a great combination – thanks Julia! - and I really look forward of what we will accomplish in the near future.
Sneak peek for next week's blog: I'm traveling to East Lansing, Michigan for -yet another-experiment!