I sat in on the beginning of an evo meeting entitled CMS101++ last week on Wednesday afternoon which was intended to be an introduction to CMS and the computing environment I will be using this summer. (In case you were wondering, evo is an online tool used by the particle physics community, and other physics community, for teleconferencing around the world; CMS is the detector I'm working on, short for Compact Muon Solenoid.) In the talk, the presenter referred to CERN's Meyrin campus as the Bermuda Triangle of Switzerland - you can go for weeks between the hostel, restaurants and office without leaving it.
Granted, it would be quite possible to do this (and tempting at times), but this past week I ventured outside of the 'Bermuda Triangle' a bit more than was good for getting my work done. I visited two of the general purpose particle physics detectors being built here (CMS and ATLAS, our rival in the 'who will see the Higgs Boson first?' game - both of which are off the Meyrin campus) just about as late as they will be open for general tours, climbed Mount Saleve which has a great view of Geneva from the top and ate fondue in Old Town with the chair of the University of Michigan's physics department. I also purchased tickets to go even further. This weekend, a group of the Michigan REU students are going to Interlaken. Next weekend, I'm going to visit high school friends in Madrid.
As I rode through the French countryside in Dan's (my mentor) Alfa Romeo heading out to point 5 (otherwise known as the big hole in the ground where CMS is being built on the LHC - Large Hadron Collider - beam line), I couldn't help smiling. It really is great to be in Europe, and I couldn't find a more exciting time to be working here at CERN.
No comments:
Post a Comment