Hey monkeys...yesterday at 5:50am some 40 people from the ETH Zürich including me departed to Geneva for a guided tour through CERN.
We got there around 9am and were welcomed by an hyperactive post-doc physicist at a very important looking conference room. Later we were told that in that conference room several Nobel prices and important decisions were made. He showed us a power point presentation, which was kind of cheap but showed some imposing figures about the complexity and hugeness of what we were about to see.
We were then taken to a big industrial hall, with two huge cranes. Here the mains parts of the equipment were assembled and then lowered to the caverns, 100m beneath the surface! The accelerator ring is a circular tunnel 27km in circumference...it is freaking huge!
There we were divided in groups of ten people and each group got a physicist as a guide. I have to say physicist are a very special kind of people. Specially the kind who devotes his whole life to an experiment that takes place 100m beneath the surface and involves recreating apocalypse like scenarios. To give you a better picture, imagine some buildings from the 50's. Narrow hallways with green floors, everywhere you look are wood details. Inside all the offices there is a blackboard that looks as old as the building. Even the furniture looks straight from the 50's. Then the black board is filled with unreadable writing and the formulas are un-understandable for anyone with less than a couple of phd's and several years of experimentation in particle phyisics. Over the desks in most offices lay meter high piles of blueprints, diagramms and important looking documents. Asked one of the guys working there how come they are so unorganized. Turns out that, that pile of paper lying on that guys desk was the work for the weekend. It's not like it had accumulated during a couple of weeks. This guys really give their life's to this experiments. They don't care about fancy details that are not directly related to the performance of the experiment they are working on. The public phones, the desks, the lights, even the bathrooms are the same since the 50's. But as soon as you find something related to the current experiments it will be as high tech as it can get. Actually it's more than high tech. They apply technologies that is home made for them, but which we will call high tech in a decade or so. I strongly encourage you all to visit the CERN's website or search it in wikipedia and you will amaze by how many new technologies have come from that single place. Moving on...
the time to descend to the cavern where the CMS detector is being assembled came.
They do have some humor at CERN:
So after descending 100m, we encountered a series of rooms filled with all kind of equipment. Some with a maze of piping, the next one with a maze of cables of all kind and the next one filled with several server looking computers.
Seeing this doesn't really prepare you to what you are about to see in the next room...you go through another normal looking door and suddenly you stand in the cavern of the CMS sensor. To be honest my eyes got all watery. I hope the next pictures make justice to how amazing that piece of engineering is:
I think this video better depicts how big the thing is!
Oh and in case you need to know if the sensor is in operation:
And some final figures:
ps: sorry about the crappy pictures (cel phone camera) and the bad redaction.
We got there around 9am and were welcomed by an hyperactive post-doc physicist at a very important looking conference room. Later we were told that in that conference room several Nobel prices and important decisions were made. He showed us a power point presentation, which was kind of cheap but showed some imposing figures about the complexity and hugeness of what we were about to see.
We were then taken to a big industrial hall, with two huge cranes. Here the mains parts of the equipment were assembled and then lowered to the caverns, 100m beneath the surface! The accelerator ring is a circular tunnel 27km in circumference...it is freaking huge!
There we were divided in groups of ten people and each group got a physicist as a guide. I have to say physicist are a very special kind of people. Specially the kind who devotes his whole life to an experiment that takes place 100m beneath the surface and involves recreating apocalypse like scenarios. To give you a better picture, imagine some buildings from the 50's. Narrow hallways with green floors, everywhere you look are wood details. Inside all the offices there is a blackboard that looks as old as the building. Even the furniture looks straight from the 50's. Then the black board is filled with unreadable writing and the formulas are un-understandable for anyone with less than a couple of phd's and several years of experimentation in particle phyisics. Over the desks in most offices lay meter high piles of blueprints, diagramms and important looking documents. Asked one of the guys working there how come they are so unorganized. Turns out that, that pile of paper lying on that guys desk was the work for the weekend. It's not like it had accumulated during a couple of weeks. This guys really give their life's to this experiments. They don't care about fancy details that are not directly related to the performance of the experiment they are working on. The public phones, the desks, the lights, even the bathrooms are the same since the 50's. But as soon as you find something related to the current experiments it will be as high tech as it can get. Actually it's more than high tech. They apply technologies that is home made for them, but which we will call high tech in a decade or so. I strongly encourage you all to visit the CERN's website or search it in wikipedia and you will amaze by how many new technologies have come from that single place. Moving on...
the time to descend to the cavern where the CMS detector is being assembled came.
They do have some humor at CERN:
So after descending 100m, we encountered a series of rooms filled with all kind of equipment. Some with a maze of piping, the next one with a maze of cables of all kind and the next one filled with several server looking computers.
Seeing this doesn't really prepare you to what you are about to see in the next room...you go through another normal looking door and suddenly you stand in the cavern of the CMS sensor. To be honest my eyes got all watery. I hope the next pictures make justice to how amazing that piece of engineering is:
I think this video better depicts how big the thing is!
Oh and in case you need to know if the sensor is in operation:
And some final figures:
ps: sorry about the crappy pictures (cel phone camera) and the bad redaction.
