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we walked the CERN perimeter last night. Well, the perimeter of the Meyrin campus anyways. It was dusk and there were huge clouds on the horizon, Mont Blanc peaking through, and everything illuminated boldly by the setting sun in the other direction. we peered into enormous warehouses where the calorimeters are coming together, we stalked the bubble-chamber-not-lunar-lander. We climbed up the cooling towers and peered in at the red LED's blinking out of windows on otherwise dark streets. We found the X-files buildings, the CERN skunk works. We gazed through the fences at the grapevines and sunflowers of the French countryside. We fraternized with the fire department (they were glad for our company). We set off some alarm at Entree A by our loitering.
The beam is ours now. We raised half our little e-cal up on the mammoth crane, the crane that eclipses the lamps and seems to make indoor weather, and set it down in the test-beam area. The other half will have its phototubes tomorrow and then it too will fly over to the test beam, and then we will unleash upon it a variety pack of hadrons, a lovely shower of protons and pions and who knows what else. We'll have real events and we'll do real physics, observing from our elevated yellow metal control room. If all goes well. Then we're hiking over the Juras to some village, our whole lab, tasting cheese or something. And apparently a CERN-logo vehicle was sighted in Paris.
The two factions of Americans are joining forces, finally. It should have happened in February but only now are we meeting, the NEU and the UMich groups. But they're still going to Amsterdam this week and we aren't. It's Bern and some more Juras for us. And troublemaking for all of us! First we'll have the T-shirts, from "Still not a member state" (with the pie chart showing the 25% contribution of the USA to CMS) to "Artemis made me do it" (rule number 2: "Don't eat the Sherpa!"); the flag raising "America Kicks Ass" a la Canada (thank you Allison); the potato cannon hurling butter-smeared vegetables into the French countryside; the accelerator for Swiss customs agents, accelerated by well-spaced crimes. Not really, of course. We're all hopped up on caffeine, on real coffee, so it's a dangerous combination. We have an authentic Citroën gettaway vehicle; too bad it can't do 120. On Tuesday we're having a picnic and then we're camping in a tent here outside the cafeteria. What was that film? Le roi de coeur?
There's a little exhibit here, right here in the CERN main cafeteria, about the situation in Iraq, and there's a guestbook, and the latest entry says, "I hope that the US and UK soldiers find their graves in Irak so that they will understand what they have done." I assume it's written in English purely for our benefit. J'suis un croissant. Je ne suis pas un terrorist. At least we don't hose people off in our train stations. Oh, wait, we do. s/train/bus/g.
The beam is ours now. We raised half our little e-cal up on the mammoth crane, the crane that eclipses the lamps and seems to make indoor weather, and set it down in the test-beam area. The other half will have its phototubes tomorrow and then it too will fly over to the test beam, and then we will unleash upon it a variety pack of hadrons, a lovely shower of protons and pions and who knows what else. We'll have real events and we'll do real physics, observing from our elevated yellow metal control room. If all goes well. Then we're hiking over the Juras to some village, our whole lab, tasting cheese or something. And apparently a CERN-logo vehicle was sighted in Paris.
The two factions of Americans are joining forces, finally. It should have happened in February but only now are we meeting, the NEU and the UMich groups. But they're still going to Amsterdam this week and we aren't. It's Bern and some more Juras for us. And troublemaking for all of us! First we'll have the T-shirts, from "Still not a member state" (with the pie chart showing the 25% contribution of the USA to CMS) to "Artemis made me do it" (rule number 2: "Don't eat the Sherpa!"); the flag raising "America Kicks Ass" a la Canada (thank you Allison); the potato cannon hurling butter-smeared vegetables into the French countryside; the accelerator for Swiss customs agents, accelerated by well-spaced crimes. Not really, of course. We're all hopped up on caffeine, on real coffee, so it's a dangerous combination. We have an authentic Citroën gettaway vehicle; too bad it can't do 120. On Tuesday we're having a picnic and then we're camping in a tent here outside the cafeteria. What was that film? Le roi de coeur?
There's a little exhibit here, right here in the CERN main cafeteria, about the situation in Iraq, and there's a guestbook, and the latest entry says, "I hope that the US and UK soldiers find their graves in Irak so that they will understand what they have done." I assume it's written in English purely for our benefit. J'suis un croissant. Je ne suis pas un terrorist. At least we don't hose people off in our train stations. Oh, wait, we do. s/train/bus/g.
