Size matters

I moved in to my dorm room at CERN on Saturday night. I had essentially no problems moving in, getting settled, etc. It's amazing to be here. I have yet to get over the fact that I'm actually in Switzerland and working on CMS.

I walked around the border of the Meyrin campus (the main CERN campus, where I'm staying) on Sunday afternoon between organized events for the Michigan REU students. The walk - approximately 2.5 km (1.5 miles) - gave me an appreciation for the sheer size of this place. This campus is small compared to the 30km diameter accelerator track for the LHC that passes through campus. If you shrink the LHC down to the length scale of experiments I've worked on so far (ignoring the optical link clock comparisons from Boulder last summer), I'm a mere dust mote. The peeling paint on the earlier buildings (1960s) would be imperceptible on that scale.

My ramble took me along roads named after famous scientists with buildings on one side, countryside on the other (a vineyard at one point on the Swiss side) and mountains all around. I started on Route Marie CURIE (near my hostel), past that to Route Albert EINSTEIN (passing Newton and Pauli on the way), along various others (Maxwell, Coulomb, Schrodinger, Zeemann...) until ending up on Route R. P. FEYNMAN, which turned into Route V.F. WEISSKOPF and turned onto Route BLOCH before dropping me back at my hostel. One of the older accelerator rings is located in the center of the site. The plants there are comfortably overgrown. I've heard that CERN has a roaming flock of sheep that is put in various corralled areas of the campus to keep the grass under control in these less-used areas of the site.

By the by, there was a large dark cloud forming outside my window when I started this post, with a background of dark forests and backlit lighter clouds. It's been fun to watch its progression and growth as I've written this post - now there are only remnants of some lighter clouds under the mountain top!