Particle physics and Indiana Jones

Particle physics really has this special ummph that makes its researchers to feel like being truth seekers of the deepest mystery of the universe. I was once admirer of such noble pursuit, and maybe I still am. I can imagine when one look at the particle tracks and match them with the known laws of physics, one may feel like an Indiana Jones in search of cosmic relics for truth. In my research life in Melbourne there was no contact with real experiments. I only look at experimental figures from the arXive but never directly performing any serious analysis on experimental data (though my boss did), since my research emphasis is on theoretical modeling. However out group did write many experimental data analysis and arguing for their interpretations. It seems to me that analysing experimental data involves much statistics and is quite a specialised field by itself, at least it is not taught at the undergraduate level. Anyway I was once quite interested in the statistical analysis and data interpretation (the curiosity was aroused mainly because I always see my boss and his collaborator writes papers on this). So there are some terminology were heard over the times, some of which I know a little but never entire clear about, e.g. bins, chi-squared, 2.5 sigma signal, 5 sigma signal, parameter spaces, best fit parameters, 99.9% confidence level (which is ironically not considered a sufficient criteria to established an experimental signal), etc. Sometimes ago driven by pure curiosity I took up the book by the Oxford physicist Louis Lyons to make some light reading. since I am not in the business of actually performing the data analysis (and has no data to access) I have not done any exercises on the data analysis. I then gradually digressed to learn up computational physics stuff instead of sitting down to try out some particle statistics analysis research.

Once upon a time I was amazed to know that we can actually 'simulate' an experiment using Monte Carlo before the experiment is carried out. Lyonn's book mentioned a bit about it but never go in depth. My curiosity in the technical details of how one actually do this still remains until today. I have this impression that actually anyone who are keen enough can perform his own analysis using his own computers by accessing the original data remotely into the particle physics lab freely, provided that he has the technical knowledge..