Part 3

My throat was still sore and my 5:30 am alarm did nothing to assuage my headache, but intellectual motivation overpowered corporeal weakness and I dressed and walked down the stairs and back into R1.  Word had spread that Higgs and François Englert, just one of the numerous physicists who came to similar conclusions as Higgs at about the same time, were on site, dignitaries specifically invited to attend the announcement in person.  Along with the CERN brass, founders of the LHC endeavor, or leaders of experimental committees who would all have reserved seats, this still left about half of the auditorium vacant.  The most energetic and physically-able, youthful summer students, graduate students, and post-docs, took advantage of this availability of seats and began lining up after dinner the night before, orderly, out of the way of major walkways, and with sleeping bags, pillows, and games to pass the night.  Without a lingering cold, I would have been there, too, but now, strolling in just before 6:00 am, I was already a few hundred people away from the auditorium, down the stairs, past the shuttered travel agent, bank, and convenience store, up the ramp and standing next to the empty, stationary conveyor for dirty dishes.

There’s a scene in the documentary Particle Fever, as the start time of 9:00 am approached, that follows the line from the auditorium, down the stairs, and stops right after the convenience store.  Obscured by a wall but just two people beyond where the scene was cut was where I was standing.  The idea for Particle Fever was conceived long before it was released and was originally planned to capture the energy of particle physics as the LHC turned on and proton collisions were analyzed.  However, as the rumors swirled, the filmmakers pivoted the story around the prospect of the discovery of a new particle, but the late hour of the announcement of the seminar prohibited the producer and physicist David E. Kaplan from being at CERN in person.  The tracking shot could have continued for next minute, as even by 8:00 am, the line to the auditorium stretched deep into R1, with hundreds more behind me.  The filmmaker’s absence meant that they used the record of this internal excitement from the formidable press office of CERN, their cameras walking up and down the line, with jovial smiling faces, waves, and thumbs up from everyone.  A friend of mine who had recently started a physics blog was here to communicate the atmosphere and consequence to the public, but had completely given up on queuing and joined the train of pacers up and down the line.  Shaking his head but wearing a mirthful smirk, he passed me and said “You’re not getting in.”  

Across an ocean and a continent, my wife was logging into the live-stream at midnight and once she had connected, messaged my closed laptop on my desk in my room.  The line to the auditorium started to inch forward, and perhaps I moved about 20 feet total before it completely dissolved.  There were only enough seats for those people who had arrived before 3 am, and as the doors to the auditorium shut again, the message was quickly relayed like a pulse down a telegraph line that we all needed to find a computer screen fast.  Watch parties had been planned in smaller auditoria throughout CERN, including in the theory group, but I went back to my hostel room, and opened my computer to learn that my wife was already viewing the speakers get wired up with microphones, test out their slides, and the Director-General pace back and forth on our projection screen.  Joe Incandela and Gianotti, the spokespersons for CMS and ATLAS, respectively, were only 100 feet away from me to summarize the work of their thousands of colleagues, but I was resigned to viewing them on my laptop, though to be fair that 100 feet required breaking through the wall of my hostel then floating through the air and boring through the roof of the auditorium.  With the most minimal introduction, Incandela and CMS were up first, and back and forth went the messages with my wife as we settled in for a once-in-a-generation experience.

Five sigma is the magical phrase, like a mysterious incantation that conjures up a new particle from the darkest depths of ignorance, thrusting it into the light of collective knowledge.  Five sigma is the most rigorous standard in all of science, representing a confidence of better than one part in 3 million that your observation was more than just an unhappy conspiratorial accident of the noise.  Incandela flipped through his slides and bigger and bigger became the signal’s bump on the background’s hill.  One result combined with another result piled shovelful by shovelful of data on top until that hill became a mountain and CMS could claim discovery of the Higgs boson at five sigma confidence.  Not to be outdone, Gianotti took the stage while the thunderous applause was still reverberating through the auditorium.  For every plot that CMS had displayed, there was one for ATLAS, just as impressive and just as significant.  Gianotti’s conclusion echoed Incandela’s: ATLAS had discovered the Higgs boson at five sigma confidence as well.  However, it was more than just that each experiment had claimed discovery, but that all of their results were completely consistent, validating each other and demonstrating the necessity of two distinct yet comparable experiments on the LHC.  If the CMS and ATLAS results were completely independent, the likelihood that they would both discover something so similar exclusively in the noise would be like winning the Powerball jackpot 30,000 times in a row.  Rolf Dieter-Heuer, the Director-General but not a particle physicist himself, spoke for all of humanity when he summarized, “As a layman, I would say, I think we have it!”

Everyone at CERN was in a daze, stunned, shocked, exhilarated to be at the place where it had happened.  The usual incoherent cacophony of conversation at lunch in R1 was replaced by harmony.  There was only one thing to talk about.  Three sigma fluctuations happen all the time, it seems, with a probability of one in one thousand to come from the noise, which is rather large in particle physics because so many measurements are performed.  When three sigma deviations are announced, opinions diverge amongst any subset of particle physicists: some will immediately salivate and daydream of the new physics it may imply, others will express hesitation and conservatism, hedging their comments on data yet to be collected, still others will categorically dismiss the result as irresponsibility from the experiment and present the laundry list of contradictory previous results.  Today, the consistent, five sigma significant results from both ATLAS and CMS shut everyone up.  We now knew something we did not even just a few hours before.

Our mini-collaboration had planned a dinner together in Geneva that night, a collection of a few physicists visiting CERN, our host, and his family.  Time had begun to slowly lift the surprise we felt, and glasses of wine helped broaden discussion and understanding of this new landscape of particle physics.  To the non-physicists around the table, we each attempted to provide our perspective on what the results meant and their impact, but it was not apparent if any bridge was built beyond that our work day was exciting and that the presentations that morning were neat.  Little did the conversation stretch to the next frontier, though it was obvious that there was still much work to be done to establish every property of this new particle and truly validate that it was the boson that Higgs had postulated so long ago.  Nevertheless, there was an unsaid undercurrent of something verging on disappointment, in the way that the night before Christmas seems brighter than Christmas once all the presents have been opened.  A mere two years into the LHC it had accomplished its goal, planned nearly three decades in the past.  Physics at the LHC would continue for about 25 years into the future, but what was next?  Was there anything that we could anticipate, to look forward to?  Or, was there just a long march up the ever-growing mountain of data, occasionally pulling out a gem or two, until that stopped?

A ray of sunshine pierced through the clouds from above the Jura, illuminating Meyrin, a subtle nod of approval from above it seemed.  This was my last full day at CERN and only now was I finally shaking off my cold, just in time to greet my wife later that day.  I was able to work until after lunch and an espresso, and then said goodbyes and returned office keys.  This week of intense collaboration had helped us focus on the work needed to complete this project, and now it was time for me to continue that work on my own.  From being alone in the CERN hostel I would be moving to a hotel in downtown Geneva with my wife, a short walk from the Cornavin train station and our transportation to Italy.  I tapped my badge a final time to open the sliding door that lead outside, facing the new tram that provided quick and direct access from CERN to Cornavin.  Normally I would have one more piece of business before boarding and moving on, but I tucked the badge that proved that this week wasn’t just a dream, that I was here, into my backpack and stepped onto the platform.

Nine months later I found myself at CERN again, again to visit a collaborator, and again my first stop was to the badging office.  That same agent from the previous summer was there, not so much greeting me but accepting that their next few minutes would be occupied by my presence.  My “bonjour” went unanswered and over the desk I handed my passport, bracing for the approaching rage as the agent typed my details and read the damning information.  Welcome to CERN.

Part 1

Interacting with the carelessness, absent-mindedness, and superiority-complexes of physicists all day must be a nightmare to the Swiss.  A well-known, senior professor from a major US university was ahead of me in line at the badging office, and their irresponsibility provoked the wrath of the security agent.  He had visited before, and the information on file that the agent reviewed on their computer was troubling, effectively detailing a most heinous grand theft from the world’s most prestigious physics laboratory.  A stern, pointed rebuke rained like hellfire, all the more frightening because it was not yelled, that their previous badge was missing, was the property of the lab, and must be returned at the end of every visit.  The professor whimpered and shuffled over to the white backdrop, mustering his best smile while the agent snapped the photo and out of the printer popped the new, warm badge.  No love was shared as the agent slammed the badge on the counter and then turned to me, before the professor had left.  “I’m here to get my badge,” I stammer, and “Yes” was the curt reply, as this was the badging office after all.  This famous hospitality still rattled me as I stepped outside to walk back to my hostel room, reviewing my fresh badge expiring on 6 July 2012.  Welcome to CERN.

This was my second trip to CERN, and both times were to visit a collaborator, Peter, who worked in the theory division.  The first was just a few months earlier, in the height of winter, and we had planned to ski in the Jura mountains, visible from CERN and just a few miles into France.  That week, however, brought the coldest weather to Europe in many years, and at CERN itself were blizzard-like conditions with high winds and temperatures dipping to -25 C.  Our ski trip never materialized, but conditions were perfect for a dinner of fondue at Bains de Pâquis on Lake Geneva.  Now, in summer, I had coordinated this work trip with my honeymoon, first a few days at CERN, then meeting my wife for some sightseeing and travel to Italy for the main event.  The work excuse was convenient, as it meant that my trans-Atlantic plane ticket could be paid from research travel funds, helping spread our frugal graduate student and newlywed budget a bit further.  The specific dates for this second CERN visit was correspondingly set by our honeymoon, the tours we had scheduled or museum tickets we had reserved, and no other physically-motivated considerations.

By this time, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was the only high-energy particle collision experiment on Earth, as the Tevatron at Fermilab had completed data collection the previous year.  A visit to CERN, located in Meyrin, a municipality of Geneva right at the Franco-Swiss border, as a particle physicist was a religious experience, bestowing intellectual indulgences on pilgrims like a visit to Rome’s basilicas.  This was the center of the universe, with all eyes and ears focusing with intensity on every little result that was put forth and its consequences for our interpretation of Nature and drawing everything and everyone into its orbit like a black hole.  Its first period of data collection, Run 1, was coming to a close in the next six months, having collided about 100 trillion protons on protons for the past nearly three years, and the tens or hundreds of particles in each collision was pored over by thousands of graduate students from nearly every country on the planet.  There had been some whispers in the hallways and over lunches that something had been found, but had it been verified? was it just a fluctuation? was this created gossip to advertise CERN?  There was no other game in town, so all waited with anticipation.

The singular, largest yearly international particle physics conference, perhaps the biggest deadline for completing analyses, drawing conclusions, and writing talks for any experimentalist, was starting this week, too, but it was very literally on the opposite side of the planet, hosted in Melbourne.  Physicists arrived in Australia that weekend from CERN, from the US, from East Asia, and beyond, seeking their own little vacation before talks and discussions started in earnest mid-week.  This had the strange effect of displacing a significant fraction of CERN, and in this vacuum in late June, it was announced that there would be a special seminar on the morning of 4 July to present recent results from the LHC.  However, this seminar was to take place at CERN, undercutting the thousands in Australia, but no mind, it would be live-streamed throughout the world.  The rumors and secrecy surrounding these “results” only produced more intrigue as to what would be reported, and institutions in every time zone scheduled watch-parties and post-talks for interpretation.  My planning from months earlier had unwittingly plopped me at CERN in the middle of it all.

I dropped my suitcase and backpack on the floor and crumpled onto the bed in my hostel room with a headache, a sore throat, and nasal congestion certainly acquired from the lack of sleep and breathing in the miasma while above 30,000 feet.  I forced myself to sit up and stay awake, as it was just afternoon and a nap would perpetuate jet lag throughout the week.  There were two things that I could do now: first, I always forget that power outlets at CERN in particular have a narrow, squashed hexagonal profile that fits none of my adapters, so I would have to borrow from the front desk.  Second, the internet at CERN is only accessible if you have an official account or are an official visitor and then your host must validate your request.  Soon my email was churning out all the messages since I closed my computer to board my flight and, now knowing that I was in town, I had received an invitation to a party at Peter’s apartment in Geneva that night.  Eyelids drooping and head throbbing, I set an alarm for three hours in the future, which would be enough time to clean up but also force me to stay in this timezone.  My head hit the pillow and instantly my eyes opened again, but it was darker and the sun was low out my window.  My alarm had stopped chiming four hours ago, and all I could muster for the rest of the night was to drag myself to the cafeteria in the neighboring building for a meager dinner of the light, crisp, yet lacking a fluffy interior pommes frites scooped from under the heat lamp and pulled myself a draft Feldschlösschen that was at least half limp, foamy head.