Excerpt from an essay on visiting CERN during the week of July 4, 2012.

The automatic door to the canteen, Restaurant 1 or R1, rotated open with its unmistakable swish, and I walked from the far end through the rows of empty tables, passing the lone cashier on my way to picking a tray and some cutlery at the entrance to the breakfast buffet.  I quickly learned during my previous visit that the ornais aux abricots were fantastic, two soft, ripe apricot mounds like a fresh egg yolk on a light and crunchy puff pastry, and added some fruit and juice to round out the meal.  My head still hurt and I had stared at the ceiling much longer than expected after my alarm, but I was here now, slowly shaking off Pacific Daylight Time, with a few old timers who arrived at work early in the morning for coffee and bavarder.  Soon, I was back toward the buffet, placed my tray on the conveyor, and continued on, past the convenience store, bank, and travel agent, up the stairs to the main entrance of the auditorium.  This was also at a threshold where the floor changed, and a line of tiles in the center of the hallway gestures one past the library around a corner through a corridor of offices and up another flight of stairs to the administrative office for the theory division.  It is joked that theorists can’t remember how to get to R1, but all they have to do to find food is to keep their nose down and follow the line.

Theoretical physics at CERN is as storied as its experiments, with Felix Bloch and Victor Weisskopf early Directors-General of the entire laboratory, and Niels Bohr himself the first director of the theoretical physics group.  All members of the current group were luminaries in their respective disciplines, and it seemed like every other famous theorist throughout the world visited for a sabbatical year.  In no way was this esteemed tradition more tangibly manifest than in the theory building itself.  I had a friend describe the habitat of CERN theorists as an “East German Mental Hospital,” with flickering fluorescent lighting, wooden doors warped by humidity, the plastered walls covered with posters from decades of yore or cabinets stacked with piles of folders, books, or teetering sheets of paper, reaching above my head and rendering the hallway dangerously narrow if a quick escape was required.  Some of the offices of the oldest members in the group had been occupied for 50 years by a sole resident, and 50 years of papers covered every open space, leaving just a small cave around their computer screen.  This was perhaps one of the oldest places in the entire CERN site, at the time not remodeled since its construction, and simply by turning a corner one received an instant and fully-immersed baptism into the theoretical particle physics of the latter half of the 20th century.