CERN Trip

I don't have a narrative for this; just scattered observations.

The light switches are all rockers, with a tiny night light and operating backwards from ours. The French power sockets look terribly shocking: big round holes with a large ground plug sticking out at you. (Swiss ones are also recessed, and nobody else's plug fits them, but they're a pretty sensible design.) The roads wouldn't meet US driveway codes—too narrow and not quite sturdy enough. There aren't any water fountains to serve the public. All the plumbing, including the toilet tank, is behind the wall—you wonder how anything ever gets repaired. (The flush button is a large push pad on the wall.)

When the fog lifts you can see the clouds spilling over the Juras. I did get to see Mount Blanc for a few minutes, but most of the time it is shrouded in fog. The food at the cafeteria is quite good. Not terribly cheap—the cost of living is quite high here. Everybody is either drinking coffee or wine or bottled water. Some places stink of smoke, but you'll find a startling number are no-smoking buildings.

Meyrin is far grubbier than I remember—lots of identical concrete apartment blocks, some looking moderately well kept up but some with gang signs and cracked concrete and underwear hung out to dry in the damp and even a flag with a a sword between crescents on a green background, with white diagonal stripes on red beside it.

I see familiar faces from time to time: CMS has 2000 collaborators, and people come to it and Atlas from all over. I also hear lots of unhappy people, worrying that they won't make the deadline in 2007. And they're probably right; most detector groups won't be ready. But I saw some of the same thing at CDF years ago; and people took pride in their ability to make do. And were confident that the accelerator wouldn't start quite on time either. This is a bigger project, and there's a lot more national politics involved, so disaster is a bit easier to find. Some of the people I'm with delight in grousing, so maybe I hear too much bad news and too much reaction to bad news.

I have a bad feeling about this set of experiments. They're the biggest science projects in history (nobody knows the relative size of the old pre-Incan agricultural research work)--and so very visible at the level of line items in national budgets: and without any sort of obvious dollars and cents payback. This may be the last of the high energy experiments, and we'd better make it work. On the other hand, the Ice Cube project was approved, and that's neither cheap nor (as far as I know) very general: it is a lot of bucks for a handful of measurements.

The muon alignment meeting was 4 hours long. One of the speakers looked just like Agent Smith from The Matrix, though he didn't defend himself nearly so well. Just about everybody brings laptops to the meetings, and works on odds and ends during the dull spots. Me, I kept nodding off: it was about 3 in the morning my time.

Odd little curiosities in no particular order: The Airbus that brought us from Chicago to Paris had video screens in the back of each chair, and one of the features was a map with the airplane position and flight parameters. As we took off you could watch the airspeed and altitude numbers climb, though they left that feature off during the descent. (Three guesses why) The hotel bed is very low to the ground—why waste space under the bed, I suppose. Safety ads abound. The bus service is still very fine. I see almost no clocks on the walls at CERN.

I moved to the CERN hostel for the last couple of days. Smaller, a bit cheaper, a lot more convenient. I've been so busy I've not been shopping. I shot off all the film I had, but I don't know if anything will come out. The weather's been very mild; not really below freezing.

I'd the use of a rental Hyundai for a few days—a tiny stick shift. Running a stick came back to me, and I only ground the gears a couple of times, though I raced the motor a lot. I was never very good with manual transmissions. I made a point to keep to the speed limit, even with cars lining up behind me. I guess the locals know where the radar points are.