6 ms·

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 abou

by max-ch 3mo 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.

dylan604 3mo ago
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.
- adastra22 3mo ago
  You can still tour the SSC. Just requires wire cutters and a bit more spelunking.
  - amarant 3mo ago
    Damn that sounds fun! How big a risk of being shot would I be running if I tried this?
    - adastra22 3mo ago
      A non-negligible risk. More likely to get lost and drown. I wouldn't do it. But you can read about it: https://medium.com/@liboski/the-superconducting-super-collider-b96eb9abf794 https://medium.com/@liboski/the-superconducting-super-collid... https://weburbanist.com/2014/09/11/the-desertron-worlds-largest-super-collider-lies-abandoned/ https://weburbanist.com/2014/09/11/the-desertron-worlds-larg...
      - myself248 3mo ago
        Having spent some time as a cellular tech in Detroit, scrambling up half-wrecked stairwells in long-abandoned buildings to service the radio equipment still running on the roof, those accounts make it sound downright tame. I'd visit in a heartbeat next time I'm in DFW. The landscape is so spacious, I hesitate to call it urb-ex. Rur-ex?
        adastra22 3mo ago
        Those are the above ground structures. If you want to see the SSC, that is in deep underground flooded tunnels.
        dylan604 3mo ago
        Some of the tunnel property has been sold and converted to what one might call a bunker.
MikeNotThePope 3mo ago
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.
- myself248 3mo ago
  [dead]
madaxe_again 3mo ago
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.
- someonebaggy 3mo ago
  Sounds like it probably inspired the underground part of Aperture Science
  - madaxe_again 3mo ago
    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.
g6pdh 3mo ago
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.
- atemerev 3mo ago
  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.
  - PradeetPatel 3mo ago
    >Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians Is that even legal under Swiss discrimination laws?
    - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
      Try proving they're rejected because of their nationality. That said, CERN itself does have some official statements on the matter: - The International Cooperation Agreement has been terminated in 2023, following the invasion of Ukraine (https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-relations/states/Russian-Federation https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-rela...) - Their recruitment policy states they source among their member states except when they really really can't find someone to fill a position from there (https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/ https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/). I'm not sure if / how that works together with discrimination laws, however, discrimination is a different subject than nationality I think. I can't just work in the US, not because I'm Dutch but because of visum / labor / market protection / etc laws. And with CERN, added factors to consider are international funding, espionage, sabotage, etc. Some countries may decide to pull funding if CERN were to, for example, continue working with Russia or hire Russians. tl;dr it's a lot more complicated than discrimination.
braggerxyz 3mo ago
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.
kakacik 3mo ago
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.
rettichschnidi 3mo ago
> 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.

by max-ch 3mo ago

dylan604 3mo ago

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.

adastra22 3mo ago
You can still tour the SSC. Just requires wire cutters and a bit more spelunking.
- amarant 3mo ago
  Damn that sounds fun! How big a risk of being shot would I be running if I tried this?
  - adastra22 3mo ago
    A non-negligible risk. More likely to get lost and drown. I wouldn't do it. But you can read about it: https://medium.com/@liboski/the-superconducting-super-collider-b96eb9abf794 https://medium.com/@liboski/the-superconducting-super-collid... https://weburbanist.com/2014/09/11/the-desertron-worlds-largest-super-collider-lies-abandoned/ https://weburbanist.com/2014/09/11/the-desertron-worlds-larg...
    - myself248 3mo ago
      Having spent some time as a cellular tech in Detroit, scrambling up half-wrecked stairwells in long-abandoned buildings to service the radio equipment still running on the roof, those accounts make it sound downright tame. I'd visit in a heartbeat next time I'm in DFW. The landscape is so spacious, I hesitate to call it urb-ex. Rur-ex?
      - adastra22 3mo ago
        Those are the above ground structures. If you want to see the SSC, that is in deep underground flooded tunnels.
        dylan604 3mo ago
        Some of the tunnel property has been sold and converted to what one might call a bunker.

MikeNotThePope 3mo ago

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.

myself248 3mo ago
[dead]

madaxe_again 3mo ago

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.

someonebaggy 3mo ago
Sounds like it probably inspired the underground part of Aperture Science
- madaxe_again 3mo ago
  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.

g6pdh 3mo ago

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.

atemerev 3mo ago
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.
- PradeetPatel 3mo ago
  >Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians Is that even legal under Swiss discrimination laws?
  - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    Try proving they're rejected because of their nationality. That said, CERN itself does have some official statements on the matter: - The International Cooperation Agreement has been terminated in 2023, following the invasion of Ukraine (https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-relations/states/Russian-Federation https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-rela...) - Their recruitment policy states they source among their member states except when they really really can't find someone to fill a position from there (https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/ https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/). I'm not sure if / how that works together with discrimination laws, however, discrimination is a different subject than nationality I think. I can't just work in the US, not because I'm Dutch but because of visum / labor / market protection / etc laws. And with CERN, added factors to consider are international funding, espionage, sabotage, etc. Some countries may decide to pull funding if CERN were to, for example, continue working with Russia or hire Russians. tl;dr it's a lot more complicated than discrimination.

braggerxyz 3mo ago

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.

kakacik 3mo ago

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.

rettichschnidi 3mo ago

> 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.