Comment by max-ch
6 days ago
I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection.
Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a multi-story building underground, but every inch is covered with cables, sensors etc. Seeing it on photos is one thing, standing inside the biggest machine built by humankind is a completely different experience and hard to put into words.
The amount of thinking and planning that went into it is insane. CERN staff is super-friendly and open to talk and explain. If you have the possibility to visit, do it - especially with guided tours and on their annual Open Days.
I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry more about symbolic roles and political aspects than actual research, as if the PhD->Postdoc->Tenure->Professor career model serves to create real expertise and not vice versa. In general (personally) I've felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact, other than increasing the h-index, hoping to get a permanent position somewhere. Forgive the outburst, I'm in the IT industry now and I'm feeling definitely better, but eventually it was great and educational to do research at CERN.
> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact
Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder
Yes, I know her and I agree with what she says. I also think many physicists working in the field secretly agree with her but it's a taboo to admit it openly. As an insider I can assure you that currently most analyses in experimental particle physics are a mechanical repetition of previous analyses with a few slight modifications to adapt them to the bigger statistics. It's true that it could simply be an effect due to the experiments lifetime, that have been running for 20 years now and where younger generations are struggling to come up with ideas not yet explored. I can speak less from the perspective of theoretical physics, but it seems obvious to all those in the field that there's a proliferation of papers proposing new particles, new interactions, etc. with no real impact.
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Not a physicist, but isn’t the issue here that these are experiments? Failure to find a potential particle at a predicted energy shouldn’t be seen as ‘nothing to show’ or a failure. I presume it tells us something really valuable- if perhaps disappointing
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I am in the industry too and I wish to get back to the academia sometimes. Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians no matter what are their political convictions (I am pro-Ukraine, of course). But yes, as a Geneva resident, I was at the tunnels too (Alice), and I am always in awe every time I see this wonder of the modern world. Sometimes I wonder how actual humans could build this, much like people did for the pyramids.
CERN stopped hiring non member or associate member states citizens for some time now. Except in very rare circumstances, This applies to US citizens as much as Russians too.
You might disagree on that but we all know that it was political pressure.
>Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians
Is that even legal under Swiss discrimination laws?
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I spent a week there between the LEP going offline and the LHC going online on a school trip - the scale of it is just unreal - as you say, photos are one thing, but as you stand there in a vast subterranean cathedral looking up at the frantically complex detectors (we hung out with ATLAS a fair bit) it’s… awesome. In the very literal sense of the word.
Don’t know if you visited the antiproton decelerator/LEAR but they’re similarly unreal - a vast cavern, half a dozen stories high and so large it fades into blackness beyond the floodlights illuminating the various buildings and experiments within there. You descend in a rickety cage loft surrounded by no more than a box of girders, to be greeted by a vision straight out of sci-fi. Vast lead megaliths tower around like the work of some very precise techno-druids, cables and ducts snake across the floor to join unknown experiments occluded by the henges, and in this place, they make the stuff the universe abhors.
Wild stuff.
Oh, I also got to tool around on Tim’s computer which was just sat in the cafeteria at the time.
Sounds like it probably inspired the underground part of Aperture Science
That, but farther up the chain a generation of physicists was inspired by Escape From the Forbidden Planet, or on 1950s pulps reading about death rays and nuclear space battleships. Life imitates art, imitates life.
It’s just so hard to convey the sheer overwhelming size and complexity of it all - the feeling must have been akin to a mediaeval peasant who has lived their life in a thatched hut seeing a cathedral for the first time. Numinous.
As a high school kid taking physics, we got to tour the Superconducting Super Collider campus. Obviously, this was nothing compared to being next to something that was actually built and did science, but they had a the various instruments and segments the beam tube with the magnets on display. Some students would intern there during the summer. The plug was pulled by Congress before I could apply. That was my introduction to politics in science where the kid like notions of how things worked were shattered.
You can still tour the SSC. Just requires wire cutters and a bit more spelunking.
Damn that sounds fun! How big a risk of being shot would I be running if I tried this?
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I felt a similar way when I visited the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4m telescope in La Palma in the Canary Islands. It’s hard to take pictures of the entire telescope because it’s so damn big. I love experiencing the feeling of being in awe.
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I totally feel you. I visited CERN in 2002 when LHC was already in construction and we also visited the construction site of one of the earliest detectors ever build there. This thing was really really huge. We also visited the data center of the detector with its multi-pass data collection system which at that time was super impressive. It was designed to collect Terabytes of data within a fraction of a second. The hardware was very impressive. We also visited the central data center where one of Europe's internet backbones is hosted. The data silos were also very impressive. The amount of compute power and data storage available there were unimaginable high for that time. I think it will dwarf those numbers today while being not that impressive because data and compute density skyrocketed since then.
> Photos don’t do it justice.
And it does not capture the awe when you notice the constant crackling sounds down there. For which, as the tour guide explained to us, nobody knows the root cause, despite bright minds investigating it.
Sadly, I could not find any sources online about this topic.
Same here, beautiful experience and I am not hardcore phsysics/cabling/engineering nerd. The cleanness, the precision of lay of every single little cable, the sheer size of the detector when opened (was there... 2012ish, one of maintenance times).
This is spending that makes me proud to be a human and gives me hope for mankind, in similar vein as ie JWST telescope.