I Went To The @Steemstem Meetup At CERN And It Was Awesome!
That's the TL:DR version right there. I had the LHC on my bucket list before the trip, and after the trip it is crossed off, and I couldn't be happier.
But the whole experience was so rich, so jam-packed with amazing substance and awesome, good people - and ultimately, so fast - that I find myself still processing it even as I write this post.
It didn't help that my travel plans were downright stupid. I flew into Geneva from New York on Turkish Airlines with a stop in Istanbul - it took over 16 hours. Basically didn't sleep until midnight on Thursday in Geneva. Had an awesome day at CERN and CMS, and then Saturday took a 24 hour journey back to NY along the same route, with a 9 hour overnight layover in Istanbul. Worked early today, which is why this post was delayed.
Given the timetables of my flights, I'm surprised I was even conscious most of the time.
Especially at the beginning - when I picked up @suesa, @reggaemuffin, @fredrikaa and @galotta at the "Ball of Science" and drove them to a local pizza joint.
The "Ball of Science", that large pretty brown structure, is the "Universe of Particles" exhibit. At some point in groupchat I started to refer to it as the "Ball of Science." I have no idea where I got that from - I felt like I'd read it on a sign - but I could find no such sign subsequently. I can only assume I was slightly loopy.
Although I must have looked like a madman, my fellow authors were not dissuaded from entrusting me with their lives - a trust which, I think, I might have made them regret.
We all went and got pizza together as a group. I carbo-loaded big time - got a mushroom pizza (of course) - and by the end I felt I had transcended sleepiness entirely and achieved enlightenment.
Truly, by this point, in my tattered leather jacket, sleepless and filthy from my travels, I had to have looked quite crazed. But, flouting all societal norms regarding getting into cars with strangers, @suesa, @reggaemuffin and @galotta all braved the great unknown and were subjected to quite a ride.
What happens when you combine sleepiness, unfamiliarity with traffic circles, and shitty gps? Several close calls.
Within the space of 10 minutes:
- I nearly backed us off a road into a ditch.
- Veered briefly into the empty, but still opposite, lane of traffic.
- Made an illegal, like 54 point turn to get back on the right track.
- Flew over every speed bump in France at what felt like Mach 3.
Eventually, all of my passengers were dropped off at their respective locations - and had the shadiest exchange of German chocolate on a foggy, dark road in France. I made it home, muttering to myself in exhaustion, and I was certain I'd made the worst possible first impression. Certainly they wouldn't ever get in a car with me again.
Except the next day they all did just that! In fact, the four of us would spend a large portion of Friday in the car driving back and forth over the AIRTIGHT French/Swiss border - dodging stationary impediment after stationary impediment on Route De Meyrin until I could drive it with my eyes closed.
Friday was the meat of the trip - and thankfully I got some sleep beforehand.
That way I was ready for
This was the Cloud Chamber set up at the "Microcosm" exhibit at CERN.
What's happening here was the first thing to really wake me up and start blowing my mind. the Cloud Chamber is a 100% humidity chamber, slowly pumping droplets of water up from a tank below (Or maybe alcohol - not sure) and creating a vapor filled container. The vapor is then ionized by fast moving particles bombarding it - and us - constantly from outer space. And, amazingly, you can see this happen! That's what all those little streaks are in those gifs -individual particles - alpha particles and electrons for instance - that leave identifiable visual patterns in the vapor.
The gifs, and the videos, do not do the beauty of this thing justice. However, it is essentially a rudimentary sensory device at this point. Back in 1910, and for several decades, cloud chambers played a major role in the development of particle physics, and even won it's inventor a Noble Prize.
But today, CERN has developed sensors order's of magnitude more sensitive, complex, and large. And we were about to go see them.
But first - lunch at an Indian restaurant. Amazingly, @suesa and @reggaemuffin - who shares my fascination with slime molds it turns out - got back in a car with me - along with @saunter - a mushroom lover I was happy to discover - and @ceybiicien. Things went much smoother... lunch was good... lots of nice conversation throughout the day... and then on to the main event.
@lemouth gave an excellent presentation, much of the substance of which is summed up in both his many excellent general posts, as well as his preperatory posts in advance of the meetup. Then @lemouth's connection at the facility, Freya, gave another great talk about the material science behind CMS itself - including describing how the many facets of the giant sensor - for instance the tracker portion made of thousands of $1000 silicon sensors Freya helped design.
At this point, Two things have blown my mind:
Earlier in the day, @lemouth saw me gawking at an exhibit at "Microcosm" and pointed out that basically every part of the LHC and its sensors are custom designed and built. The work that goes on at CERN is really pure science - problem solving in its purest form. Plus, once CERN designs something, that information is made publicly available. Which is to say, if you had the money and the know how, you could build a replica of the LHC.
Listening to Freya, and asking questions, revealed the sheer ingenuity involved in creating a sensor like CMS. The design team for CMS were presented with a task - detect particles, including harder to detect muons, emitted from high energy collisions in the LHC. But there is no pre-made road map to solve this problem - so they just MADE ONE.
What does that road map look like?
They excavated a giant hole - found Roman Ruins - had them removed - kept digging - found an underground river - so they deep froze the Earth in layers and kept digging - laid foundation - designed, with Freya's help especially on layer 1, 5 layers of sensors - after every piece was designed from scratch, put together a factory sized detector - then lowered the whole thing into a hole 100 meters deep with only 4 cm of horizontal clearance. (And I'm leaving out a ton of details, any one of which would have been a deal breaker for most people).
This is what really amazed me - and had me smiling like an idiot the moment we stepped foot in the CMS facility - the completeness of the scientific process, and the scientific mindset, manifested in the form of one of the most complex, totally bespoke technological achievements in human history.
CERN - and the various teams involved in the LHC and its sensors - are a collaboration of people solving monumental problems, uninhibited by normal conceptions of what is possible, simply because there is a problem to be solved.
The people working at CERN do not act for profit, or for fame - although to be sure their work may enable these things. It is clear, seeing @lemouth and Freya speak and show off the astounding things they've created and investigated and discovered, that they believe in the spirit of discovery for discovery's sake alone - for the benefit and edification of themselves, and humanity as a species. I was overwhelmed by the energy of the place, and couldn't stop smiling.
Eventually, down the 100 meter, skyscraper high tunnel we go to get a close up of the CMS.
Of course, the guts of the place are amazing in several regards:
- Want some high end computer processing and machine learning - check
- Looking for a 27km pipe filled with liquid helium - check
- Ever wanted to have your body destroyed by an 8 tesla magnetic field - check
- How about just the life altering tingle of 4 tesla's coming off CMS itself - sure thing.
- Or a meter wide hole packed to the brim with fiber optic cables that can transmit countless gigabytes of data per second - Okeedokee
I mean, take another look at this thing:
Here's some incredible facts that aren't immediately apparent.
- The CMS splits in half for maintenance - that's why it looks like the right side fits into the left side.
- The right side is on hydraulics or something that lift up its many thousands of pounds and allows just TWO people to move it.
- The tube that connects the two halves is the LHC pipe coming together at a collision point - it continues through the earth 13.5km in either direction.
- See the brightly lit Star Trekky are on the left side? That's where the beams cross. The pipe at that location is different from elsewhere in the LHC in that it is pure beryllium.. They chose beryllium because it is a super light metal, but it is also highly carcinogenic and dangerous.
This last bit leads me to a story that, for me, sums up why I loved this experience so much, and how much I've come to respect CERN:
I asked Freya about whether the Beryllium pipe degrades with time. She said that it does, but that it would only likely be removed at the expected end of the CMS project in over a decade. However, by that point, because of the sheer number of collisions which will have occurred over the projects life, the beryllium pipe will be so highly radioactive that no human being could go near it. But, she said, since they knew this would be a problem, they are working on custom made robotics that will be able to retrieve it.
Faced with a problem nearly two decades in the future, the CMS team is already planning a custom solution. If the intellectual and practical rigor at CERN was brought to bear across our species, there would be no boundaries for us anymore. For those of you who have read "The Foundation" series, CERN is the closest thing humanity has to a real life Foundation.
There was precious little time left after CMS.
I managed to drive @lemouth to his train without killing everyone, although we clipped the edge of the road at speed once... but everyone seemed unconcerned by this. Got stuck in traffic, hunted down @saunter thinking he was lost - was relieved he was not - the was very happy to spend the evening at a bar with the remaining meet-up crew. Turned out to be a great night, despite my return to exhaustion. Managed to get everyone home safe and, next day, began my 24 hour monster flight home.
And now, here I am.
TL:DR - It was an absolutely pleasure to meet everybody who came on this trip. It was an absolute joy to be exposed to the incredible work being done at CERN and CMS. Next time I feel that the human race is beyond redemption, trapped in the web of our own imperfections, I will think fondly and with hope on what I experienced on this trip. I mean that earnestly - CERN is representative of a higher ideal for what humanity can achieve.
