A Pilgrimage to Bern

Last weekend, I went to Bern with three guys from the University of Michigan REU program. The trip was part vacation, part pilgrimage. Albert Einstein was born in Bern, where he returned after graduating from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) and lived for several years with his first wife. His time there included his 'Annus Mirabilis' (Miracle Year), 1905, when he published not one but four papers that changed the course of physics.

Again, we spent just about 24 hours in Bern, arriving around 8pm on Friday night and departing at 9:30pm on Saturday night. The hours were packed, familiarizing ourselves with the gorgeous old town area, finding really comfortable reclining chairs in a park in the middle of town, rushing to the Zytglogge just before the hour so that we could see the clock face animate, eating rösti (a typical dish from the canton of Bern), visiting various Einstein sights and the exhibit on Einstein at the museum there and trying to find all the fairy-tale fountains. I also spent a good half hour hunting for a wallet for my office mate Joe, who had debated over getting a wallet with the Bern flag on it for the better part of an hour the last time he had been in Bern and decided against it... and then really wanted it when he got back to Geneva!

I promised some of you more pictures, so here are a few:

Physics students on a pilgrimage at the Einstein exhibit in Bern's history museum - note the E=mc^2 stickers! (it's not the best picture, but it's the best we got of the four of us... ignore the red eye!)

(L-R Chris, Joseph, me, Nathan)

Bern's old town from the other side of the river

Nathan in front of the Einsteinhaus, where Einstein lived from 1903-1905.

Joe's (my office mate's) favorite fairytale fountain in Bern, which he dubs the "ogre eating baby" statue.

This fountain is much more family friendly (although the steps are steep!)
Here, I'm attempting the Ian Anderson pose with a bamboo flute I found in a box of German books in an alley marked "Gratis."

A picture of the inside of Münster (Bern's cathedral)
(Katie - there's more where this came from!)

Running CMS (or How I spent my Friday night)

There is something glorious about having an entire detector - or at least an entire subsystem of a detector - under your supervision and care for 8 hours. Work on CMS (the Compact Muon Solenoid) has been going on for over 20 years, involving over 2600 people from 180 institutions. The detector itself will include - when finished (which I'm told will be soon!) - the largest magnet built yet which will create a 4 Tesla field, several tons of brass from melted-down Russian artillery shells, over 2500 square feet of silicon detectors and a data rate roughly equivalent to that of the global telephone networks. (sources http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/CMStrivia/CMStrivia.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Muon_Solenoid)

Last week, I took two of these 8 hour shifts learning how to run - and take care of - the CSC (Cathode Strip Chamber) muon detector system in CMS.

My shift on Thursday was a "day" shift, nominally running from 8:00 to 16:00. However, in order to get a ride to the detector (in Cessy, France, about 6mi/10km away from the Meyrin site where I'm staying) I left the Meyrin campus at 6:30, arriving sometime around 7. The shift started out fine. Around 8:45, just as my fellow shifter Ingo and I had just started to settle in, one of our monitoring screens started flashing red lights at us left and right. It started with 4 errors, then the low voltage monitoring subsystem reported so many errors we had to scroll, and - less than a minute after that - the temperature monitoring subsystem had as many errors as the low voltage system! Troubleshooting these errors (or, more like it, finding the right phone numbers to call and then watching the experts troubleshoot) took up a significant portion of my first shift.

A few hours later, the verdict was in: a worker in the detector pit had unplugged a few wires to do some work by the detector without informing the right people, tripping a fire alarm which subsequently cut power to half of our detector. The moral of this story? Even though there's literally thousands of wires on the detector, the scientists operating the detector really can tell if and when they get switched or unplugged!

My shift on Friday ("swing" shift, 16:00 - 24:00) was considerably calmer. I was on shift with Nick and Laszlo. Nick was by far the most experienced shifter of the three of us. He is a graduate student at the University of Florida and has done weeks if not months of commissioning shifts. Laszlo, a professor at Perdue (from what I understand), has been working on the CSC system since 1994 but hadn't taken any shifts before Friday. As for me, I had Thursday's system mess under my belt, but relatively little experience with "normal" operations.

On this shift, I made up for the casual conversation - and some cultural learning - that I missed out on during the troubleshooting of Thursday morning during this shift. There were a few moments that I felt very American. For example, Nick made some comment (which wasn't intended to be taken literally - it was full of hyperbole and creative interpretation of history) that credited his Greek heritage for a lot of Roman accomplishments. An older Italian gentleman taking a shift for the DT (Drift Tubes, another muon detection system, whose monitoring station is right next to the CSC's monitoring station) detection system didn't understand the joke and proceeded to give Nick a history lecture. Laslzo had to help put out the fire.

Thursday and Friday were pretty much the highlights of my weekend, even though my shift was work. The novelty of running CMS hasn't rubbed off yet! It was a rainy weekend in Geneva (there was a terrific downpour just as I was leaving Cessy on Friday), so I went to museums, found an English language bookstore and walked around the Botanical Gardens near the UN (they have a really cool exhibit on math through October, called jardin de maths. All the descriptions are in French, so my handy pocket dictionary got a workout!).

The latest (old) news: [Sky high]

CMS Eye / Kristi on Webcam

If you manage to check my blog before 6pm EST (midnight CERN time), check out this page:

http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/cmseye/index.html

Here's an example:

There's a webcam (specifically camera 6) that has a fairly good view of where I'm sitting... eating pretzels, reading Griffiths Introduction to Elementary Particles, talking to Nick (my fellow shifter) and... oh yeah... helping to operate CMS!

Madrid

Last weekend, for the first time this summer, I spent a weekend in a place where I had studied the language. I've been dreaming of going to Spain since high school - if not before. There were several moments during the weekend when I found myself smiling just because I had once again remembered that I was verdaderamente (actually) en España.

Because my time was limited, I spent relatively little time doing "touristy" things. I wanted to get a taste of the real Spain, not the one that is wrapped up in a nice, neat package for los extranjeros (foreigners) to see. I stayed with Martin, a friend from my high school Spanish class whose family spends almost every summer in a little town an hour outside of Madrid. While Madrid was nice to visit - I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday afternoon before my flight left in Madrid with Martin, Laura (another high school classmate) and Martin's friend Juan Miguel walking around the city - it was this little town that impressed me the most. The town's atmosphere reminded me in some ways of Treviso, the overgrown medieval city that I stayed in while visiting my relatives the first week I was in Italy. However, the arid climate, streets opening up to vistas of the surrounding hills, the storks nesting on the cathedral's belfry, the post-holes in the streets for the running of los toros (bulls) and something that I couldn't really put my finger on about the way people interacted with each other made me very aware of the fact that I was somewhere that was culturally different.

It turns out that my Spanish is rusty after three years of limited use. On top of that, the undercurrent of "th" that pervades Spanish as it is spoken in Madrid made it difficult for me to understand native speakers. Despite those difficulties - or perhaps because of them - I left with a renewed desire to practice speaking Spanish and a new book, a Spanish translation (from Portuguese) of Paulo Coelho's El Zahir.

Administrative Notes

I've done a bit of thinking about how to handle stories from my travels in Italy (and, as it stands, my first weeks in Geneva and last weekend's Interlaken trip). Here's what I'll do:
When I post something, it will be backdated but the text of the document will include the online posting date. Also, the next post I make in real time - such as this one - will have at the bottom links to the post(s) I have made and backdated. Hopefully this scheme works out alright! Granted, there's no guarantees that I'll actually add many of the stories until after I get home from this fabulous journey - I'm too busy making more stories and barely have time to write!

The latest (old) news: [il Museo di Storia della Scienza]

Pictures!

I haven't posted any pictures yet... so here's a hodgepodge of a few (somewhat randomly picked, and in somewhat random order) images from the time I've been in Europe so far:

Piazza della indipendenza, Treviso

San Marco, Venice (of course)

countryside outside of Assisi from a perch by fortress on the top of the hill

... because the most likely place in the world to run into Nick was outside a tobacchi shop as I was putting stamps on postcards (picture in the Pantheon)

Jet d'eau decked out for Eurocup 2008 (Geneva, Switzerland)

View of Geneva off Mount Saleve (France near the French-Swiss border)

At the "other" particle detector (ATLAS) outside of Meyrin, Switzerland (about 150 meters under the surface)

a paraglider (not me) in Interlaken, Switzerland (Joungfrau in the background)

In other news, the CERN Summer Student Lecture Programme started today. There's over 215 students attending the lectures, which makes for crazy lines at the cafeteria when the lectures get out. It's awesome to be at CERN with a bunch of undergraduates from all over the world who have come here for the same reason I have - to learn about particle physics! Maybe by the end of the summer, we'll be referring to ourselves as "CERNois" (as the permanent staff does) instead of by our nationalities.

There's a bunch of other things to update you on (like paragliding and my trip to beautiful Interlaken), but that will have to wait for now!

Sky high

A group of 11 of the American REU students took off this past weekend for Interlaken, Switzerland. It was a bit of a push to get everyone together to leave the hostel right after work (5:15PM), but (somehow) we all made it. It was a minor miracle - none of our connections had a lag time of more than 10 minutes.

After checking in at our hostel, the herd of us wandered around Interlaken looking for - depending on who you talked to - dessert, a bar, a discotheque or a large (but preferably cheap) dinner. We all somehow ended up at the same restaurant. I had French Onion soup (shoutout to Katie!), which was delicious, but not all that different from the mock-French Onion I make for myself at school. After dinner, we split up. I ended up walking around town with a few others, finding local oddities like a building with cow statues on a balcony, waking up the coy in a small oriental garden and taking pictures in the dark (almost all of which turned out poorly). It was fun, but the most memorable moments were on Saturday.

At about 9:30AM on Sunday, 7 of our group put our bags in day lockers and piled into a van to go paragliding. Because there were so many of us, the outdoors adventures business that we went with split us into two groups. I was in the second. After watching the first group land, I went up myself. It's hard to describe the ride. After getting into a harness and running with my guide down a gentle slope on a mountain overlooking the city, we were airborne. Instead of the little window picture of the ground below that you see when you're in an airplane, I was surrounded by views. The scenery was amazing. The mountains were reminiscent of Lord of the Rings and the two lakes (between which Interlaken - "between the lakes" - is located) were a turquoise I hadn't expected to see anywhere outside of the Caribbean.

After landing, throwing on cooler clothes and grabbing lunch at a local burger joint, a group of five of us went off in search of a good hike. My misreading of the trail map estimated times and much debate about whether German abbreviation "Std." (Stunden) was hours (it is) or some unit of distance meant that I didn't actually summit. Nonetheless, the walk to the trailhead and the bit of the trail that we went up were nothing to sneeze at. At one point we were walking along an overgrown forest-y road with exposed rock on either side when the road opened up to this cool, rundown castle/fortress.

Once we got back to Interlaken, I convinced the rest of the group to go minigolfing with the free minigolf passes we had been given when we checked in at the hostel. It was a ridiculous course, which took the competitive aspect out of playing. There were some holes, especially at the end, that we really didn't have a chance at making. It seemed like everyone really enjoyed it - I know I did.

Before catching our train back to Geneva, we went out to dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant named Restaurant Tenne. It was off the beaten path, but the food was wonderful. I had linguine with salmon in vodka sauce with a glass of the house beer (which only amplified my good mood brought on by gorgeous views, some physical activity and fun minigolfing). Dinner was topped off with two shared ice cream desserts. I took a fancy to coconut sorbet served with limoncello and Chris wanted to try the "Amadeus" (caramel ice cream with brandy sauce and some sort of delicious wafer dipped in chocolate). Delicious!

All that was in - if you ignore travel time - less than 24 hours. On top of that, once I got back to Geneva (at about half past midnight), I sat outside by the LHC dipole magnet by Restaurant 1 and saw no less than two brilliant shooting stars.

[posted 13 July]