A reminder that physicists are frequently furry

A few days ago the Kolb family and I visited CERN, where Jeff is currently working. An interesting note, the acronym CERN does not stand for the lab's current name, but rather for the council that originally set the lab up in 1952, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, see here. What is CERN? Well, perhaps most interestingly for most people reading this post, it is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, although of course that has essentially nothing to do with the main purpose of the lab, physics, which I'll get to in a moment. Here is a photo of the office where the web was invented.

So why does CERN exist? I suppose at the simplest level the point of the bulk of the research being done at CERN is to improve our understanding of how subatomic particles behave and interact with one another. Incidentally, this is not too dissimilar from the research I did as a graduate student. You can think of a particle accelerator like the one at CERN like a really big microscope. The reason it costs so much is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to "see" these phenomena.

Jeff is working on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment.  Oh, I almost forgot to say, CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider, in particular, is huge. Like 27 kilometers around huge. Here Jeff is pointing to Ornex, France, where his family lives. Note that it is within the ring of the LHC. Crazy, huh?

Anyhow, in the morning he took me over to the CMS site. Here is the control room. Very cool. A lot of CERN feels like it could be straight out of a science fiction movie.

In addition to being on call from time to time, Jeff works in here occasionally, monitoring various components of the CMS experiment.

As you might imagine, it takes quite a bit of computational power to make a machine of this scale work, let alone to crunch through all of the data that is produced. Here is one of many rooms full of computers at CERN. And by the way, a very significant portion of the data processing is actually done in other sites all over the world.

For lunch Jeff, Ruthie, their kids and I went up to one of the cafeterias at CERN. It was here, in particular, that I was pleasantly reminded of just how frequently physicists are furry. And really, whether or not an individual physicist is furry, they are certainly likely to be at least a bit eccentric, and that's wonderful.

Towards the end of my tour, we walked by a statue of a particular manifestation of Shiva, apparently a gift to CERN from the Indian government.

In a way I kind of felt like I had come full circle. There was also a quote by Fritjof Capra, author of the Tao of Physics among other books. I read this book when I was a rather young and impressionable seventeen year old. And I realize that reading it may be part of the reason why I decided to study physics and theoretical high energy physics, in particular. He painted such a beautiful picture of the world. I think in some ways, though, I think I misunderstood what he was trying to convey, and just took away a somewhat naive, if not downright crude caricature of his profound ideas. In graduate school, as I learned about the scientific method on a much deeper level, about assumptions and approximations in science, about experimental error, I became a bit jaded and came to strongly disagree with arguments such as those put forth by Capra. I found them misleading at best. But now I feel a little more relaxed about the whole thing. You could call it intellectually laziness if you like. I'd rather say I'm a bit more at peace, a bit more wise maybe even. I should be careful, though. I don't want to get ahead of myself... Regardless, it was great to visit CERN, and be reminded of all of this, in particular after just having been in the East. Way to be.