CERN's quirks - part one

For those who have never been to CERN, I imagine it must seem like some kind of mythical place, where state-of-the-art technology and science boffins come together every day to make new discoveries and plough undaunted into the unknown in the name of science. And to some degree it is. But the reality is also a lot more mundane than some of the news report would have us believe.

It isn't, I'm afraid, a very visually attractive place. You might think that all that state-of-the-art technology would be carried over into the buildings themselves, and that walking around the site would be like wandering around a series of space age glass boxes, with holograms on the walls and giant pieces of particle-finding equipment around every other corner. Sorry to disappoint. If anything, CERN looks more like a big industrial estate or set of factories. When you think about all that atom-smashing equipment, they've got to make it somewhere, and a lot of the big buildings at CERN are dedicated to making stuff. Most of the rest of the buildings are dedicated to housing the thousands of people who work there, along long dark corridors of identical-looking offices.

But it has its quirks. All of the buildings are given numbers instead of names - Andy works in Building 40, Restaurant 1 is in in Building 501. These happen to be more or less side-by-side, so don't let the numbering system lull you into thinking there is a sensible pattern to it. The roads (of course there are roads, the site spans several square kilometres) are named after notable scientists:

Some famous scientist or other

The site has two restaurants, Restaurant 1 and Restaurant 2, and the bigger and busier of the two, Restaurant 1, serves an absurdly wide-ranging choice of food. It's not your average work canteen. (Until recently, the food options were called 'Menu proton' and 'Menu neutron'. It's a little sad to me that they abolished this fun (if slightly cheesy) naming system. Perhaps CERN weren't making any money out of 'Menu neutron' because it has no charge? Ba-dum-tssh. Thank you. I'm here all week.) Between the hours of 12 and 2, the restaurant swarms with hundreds of people, and you can choose from up to three different main courses, two lavish salad bars, freshly baked pizza, pasta, sushi, soup or just plain old sandwiches. And that's before we've got on to the patisserie counter with its huge array of beautiful freshly-made tarts and fancies.

But if you're the shy type and would prefer not to mingle with people at lunchtime, there's always the vending machine. Not the kind of vending machine that sells crisps and chocolate bars. The kind of vending machine that sells packets of cooked ham, cans of sweetcorn, bags of pasta, bottles of milk and processed sausages.

It's easy to see why some people might decide to hide away in their rooms sometimes. Physics chat is pretty much a constant at CERN, from first thing at breakfast (over freshly-made pastries, but you have to arrive early to get the custard-filled ones, or the beautifully-named frivolité d'abricot - or 'apricot frivolity') to last thing at night as people sit around outside drinking beer and looking out to the Mont Blanc in the distance. And while you're lunching, you can catch up on how things are going underground, on one of the beam monitors stationed around the restaurant:

If this is starting to sound a bit more like the CERN you had pictured, then here are a few more titbits to keep you happy. On the grass outside the restaurant, they've stationed one of the dipoles (giant magnets) for the LHC:

The dipole, with Mont Blanc's snowy peaks just visible in the background

And the inside of Building 40 has a giant mural of the CMS experiment emblazoned across it (bad news for the ATLAS folk who share the same office space):

Building 40

If you're lucky enough to have a guide, or a husband with an access card, you can also be taken down to the ATLAS control room to see the boffins in action, as they monitor what's going on within the LHC itself. The very best thing about this part (sadly not pictured) is the giant red button that they've put in the viewing area that sets off some flashing red lights just so visitors can legitimately press a Big Red Button (apparently it's quite distracting for those actually working behind the glass). 

ATLAS control room

The LHC has four 'experiments' around its 27km ring, and ATLAS (Andy's experiment) happens to be stationed right on the main CERN site (well, just across the road beside the swimming pool actually). I am one of the lucky folk who was able to descend in a lift some 100 metres underground and take a tour of ATLAS before the cavern was closed up and the LHC was started. It was quite a staggering sight. The cavern itself is the size of St Paul's Cathedral, but pretty much all of that available space is filled with something: from the huge pieces of structural metal to the tiny colourful electronics and hundreds and thousands of wires. And a human being - or several human beings - decided where each and every bit should go. What you see on the TV doesn't capture the magnitude of it. CERN may not be very pretty to look at on the outside, but what's going on inside is pretty exciting.