Part 2

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 poached 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.

My office for the week was a graduate student bullpen, with several desks arranged along the walls and a large blackboard hung amongst the bulletin boards, maps of the CERN Meyrin site, of the greater Geneva area, and of all of Europe, with an ironic demotivational poster titled “BURNOUT” centrally featured, bearing portraits of Ludwig Boltzmann and Paul Ehrenfest.  The Jura filled the view out of the window above the flat rooftops of the rest of CERN and provided a necessary relaxing, meditative background to distract away from my laptop’s screen.  Much of my work that week would be spent looking over a shoulder at my collaborators’ screens in their office just a few feet down the hall.  We were working to expand the particle physics simulation software that Peter developed with calculations I had performed with my advisor a few years earlier.  I was much more comfortable with low-technology calculations with pen on paper than with their implementation into computer code, so as much as possible I left the programming to Peter.  He was, however, an author on perhaps the most widely-used program in all of particle physics so I used these opportunities to soak up his knowledge and then eke out whatever I could when I was called on to code.  A rap at the door marked that the gathering for lunch had begun, so I left my computer on my desk and joined the group in the hall.

The essence of CERN is distilled into lunch at R1.  Thousands throughout the site descend on the canteen, and viewing the hot lunch options at the various stations is slowed by the crush of people bearing trays and waiting in nebulous lines that fan away from the sneeze guard where the cook spoons the pasta, steak haché, or frites onto a plate.  The first through the cashier would wait a short distance away between opposing currents of people finding food or a seat and wave their arm and nod generally to where a table with enough seats had been claimed.  The beverage with lunch was most commonly water, free and filled into small glasses from a many-spouted fountain by pressing a red button for a few seconds.  The water station was probably the densest place in all of R1, sandwiched between the cashiers and the major thruway in and out and set on the wall immediately below the live status updates of the LHC’s beam projected from a television, its announcement displayed in bold, green font though only operating at just over half of its designed energy.  The roar from the innumerable layers of conversations was intoxicating and any little bit that your ear could single out was an immediate physics education in miniature, spilling into the courtyard with even more tables.  Our group was perched near the end of the concrete patio, with a view to the southeast punctuated by Mont Blanc’s white peak stabbing the blue sky 50 miles away, and a sky-blue cylinder set on the lawn and around which frisbees were tossed and avoided that would house a superconducting magnet of the LHC 50 feet away.  Painted in white on the cylinder was CERN’s motto, “Accelerating Science,” in the lab’s two official languages and everyone now enjoying lunch did their part to make the ride just a little bit faster.

Lunch was not complete without an espresso and for theorists there were a couple of options.  A coin-operated machine was located right at the tray conveyor, where everyone after lunch would have to pass through, but the commotion from R1 prohibited a relaxed group conversation and the line stretched out of the doors to R1 and down the ramp to the convenience store.  Today, we ventured on, back to the seminar room on the theory floor which would both be vacant and quiet and with two machines that just needed a coffee pod from those rationed to visitors on arrival.  I turned the final corner a bit too tight and nearly collided with Fabiola Gianotti, the spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, who was escorting Peter Higgs on a tour of CERN, and their entourage that trailed throughout half of the hallway behind them.  This was a curious development in the whispers surrounding this upcoming mysterious seminar: the outward-facing leader of one of the main experiments at the LHC was hosting the man who postulated the particle that had eluded discovery for 50 years.  This was about as close in physics as we get to juicy gossip of global impact, and we shared our speculations between sips of coffee.