02. The CERN (First Part)

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening - everyone reads when they want -. And hello again.

I was glad to see so many of you reading the first post. One tends to forget the relatives and friends he has until it's time to buy a beer. On the plus side, from this corner of the world, there won't be many invitations to make; on the minus side, there won't be many invitations to make either.

Getting down to business, today I bring you some comments on CERN, the laboratory-centre where I work - in case anyone had forgotten -.

We could talk about the standard model of particles and how we are on the verge of going beyond it. That the Higgs Boson and bell-bottoms are a thing of the past, and that quantum computing is best understood between R1 pizzas with Schrödinger's hamster. But I don't want to smother you with my extensive knowledge of antimatter - it's funny because it's a joke -.

I think it's more interesting to talk about other little details.

In the two almost four weeks that I have been here, I have seen that to survive at CERN, you need to know two things.

One:

The buildings, ALL the buildings of CERN (including the annex of the extension of the guard doghouse), are numbered. Logical, you will say. But it's a trap! If you go out unprepared and unprovided from building 30 hoping to get to building 31 across the street, it is very likely that you will end up walking around the accelerator with the hadrons - and that's not a joke -.

Here's an example,

My office is in building 54. On the other side of the car park that I see from my window is building 693. The main entrance to CERN (Meyrin site : one of the two CERN campuses), as is logical and normal, is gate B. But don't worry, because before entering this labyrinth we can register and ask for directions in building 55. If we are hungry, we go to restaurant number one, R1 for friends, which is in building 501, next to the main building, which is 500.

Faced with this apparent lack of order, I have several theories:

1. The genius mind behind CERN's urban planning wanted to develop the imagination and creativity of its users to train them to look for the possible in the impossible.
2. When they started numbering it was windy, and the numbering panels were randomly distributed following an eccentric bi-normal distribution.
3. A schizophrenic monkey was given post-its with the numbers and a map of CERN..
4. All of the above are true (in which case, to make 2 and 3 compatible, you have to visualise the schizophrenic monkey being carried by an alpine tornado and throwing numbers in the air).

For the sake of truth, for the sake of CERN's corporate image, and for the sake of my job survival when HR reads this - because no doubt they will read it at some point - I have to say that this numbering is the result of different cross-systems that have evolved over the more than 60 years of the centre's history. Here is an explanation.

This is the map of the Meyrin site, the campus/complex/industrial estate where I work. Here's a little game: Oliver has to come from the residence to the office to bring me the dosimeter that I forgot so I can go down to the accelerator. I have my office in building 54, and Oliver enters through the door of building 538. Which is the shortest way he can go? Here is the interactive map from which the image is taken.

The second thing you need to know on this site is acronyms. Lots and lots of acronyms. An infinite universe of acronyms. Let's start with the accelerators (CERN has 3) - I leave you the hyperlinks to each case so you can check it -:

• PS: Proton Synchroton
• SPS: Super Proton Synchroton

Come on, I'm sure you can guess the third one. Insh, almost. Sorry, SSPS is not the right answer.

• LHC: Large Hadron Collider

And there is still a fourth one under study (100 km of tunneling requires some study time) that goes by the original name of 

• FCC: Future Circular Collider.

But more fun are the names of the facilities that house the accelerators, the so-called experiments. Here are my favourites, 

• ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (A Toroidal ApparatuS for the LHC)
• ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment
• ISOLDE: Isotope mass Separator On-Line (Let's not look for an explanation of the ED.) 
• CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid
• LHCb: Large Hadron Collider beauty 

And so on and so forth. Little by little I will continue to learn them. Here is also a link to an informative video from CERN so that you can see how the different accelerators work and how they are interconnected.

And here is a schematic of all the installations. There are more detailed ones, but I'm not sure if it's public information or not. As I have taken this from Wikipedia, I know it is freely available. Honouring intellectual property, I leave the reference of the schematic at the end of the post ¹.

I should also tell you about how the day-to-day is going, but the post is already late and the real estate agencies have me tired, exhausted, devastated. In a week's time I think I'll have my own flat - hopefully I'll get to 30 m2 - but until then, I think we'll leave it at that for today.

Hugs and kisses to all of you from Oliver and myself!

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I missed my swimming costume to get all the way into the Geneva Lake. But well, it wasn't a bad soak. And this time I managed not to burn my bald head.

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And then a game of chess. A week ago I plucked up the courage and also played with strangers.

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And here's an international dinner at the residence: Spain, Ireland-UK, Germany and Pakistan. Morocco was taking the photo.

P.S. Honouring the name of the blog, I have already started with my underhand business. At the moment I deal in washing machine tokens - I think I have all ten tenants of the plant on the payroll. Washing machine and dryer that are, by the way, very funny. I had a pair of comfy perroflauta's² pyjamas that I washed with the rest of the dirty clothes. The thing is that I used to be able to dance reggae in them, and now they're more for reggaeton. That makes me think that Bob Marley didn't die, but that he accidentally got into a tumble dryer and went by the name of Daddy Yankee. I'll leave the theory there, I think it's got a lot of potential.

1. By Forthommel - Own workhttp://public-archive.web.cern.ch/public-archive/en/research/AccelComplex-en.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15291088

And today in our guiris' corner:

2. Perroflauta: Literally dogflute, it is the "loving" way to refer to people in hippy dressing and doing hippy things, as playing flute in the street in company of dogs, asking for money.