The highest energy accelerators in the world cover a lot of ground. The LHC tunnel passes mostly hidden under pasture and a few small farms, but even right in the middle of the laboratories, assembly buildings, and offices of CERN’s Meyrin site one finds a flock of sheep. The sheep rotate through a few disjoint grassy patches small enough that I really start to wonder if it’s worth the trouble.  CERN’s sibling over in the US, Fermilab, hosts on its grounds some even more substantial farm and wildlife: bison, horses, deer (though the population was heavily culled a few years back to make the roads safer) and some ponds well stocked with fish and frequented by herons.

At least one person has relayed the speculation that the animals are primarily present to allay local’s fears of radiation: if sheep can spend all day snacking on top of an accelerator then how dangerous can it be? The problem I have with this theory is that it makes no mention of the scientists who spend just as much time in just as much proximity to our scary science stuff.  Does the public honestly think we are so driven to distraction by our whizzing particles that we might very well hang our balls in the beam to see if it tickles?  Let me go on record and say definitively, no, we are not.

Below I present evidence of how deadly serious the Fermilab-CERN competition is.

Sheep take shelter under CERN's ISR overpass near one of the LHC assembly building.

One of my many coyote sightings at Fermilab

Potential for future study:

  1. Apply a Lotka–Volterra model to the CERN and Fermilab scientific populations.
  2. Cite this blog post as the only motivation.
  3. Win Ig Nobel prize (for a physicist of my meager stature, the equivalent of ‘profit’).

That is unless one of our five highly esteemed readers scoops me on this. I dare you.