I have to give a shout-out to I Can Haz Large Hadron Collider.  My favorite image from the site is the following;  needless to say, it is the apex of all our hopes and dreams as physicists.

Earlier we discussed the LHC’s current robot monorail, little TIM, but 30 years ago CERN had far loftier goals and they were all about getting grabby. What follows are some photos grudgingly requinquished by CERN’s  document server. The first one is my favorite, because this fellow is clearly living the 1981 dream.

Ever wish you could just shoot your arms through an iron-impregnated concrete wall and shake some sense into that radioactive pressure vessel on the other side? In 1981 you could.

The robot arms were eventually upgraded and attached to both monorails and trucks tethered by umbilical cord. “MANTIS’ as it was known, has more photos in CDS. You can also read more at “MANTIS – a compact mobile remote-handling system for accelerator halls and tunnels”, “MANTIS 2 : a new long range remote vehicle and servo-master-slave manipulator for the CERN accelerator complex” and “Teleoperator evolution at CERN”.

Reading some of those documents, MANTIS sounds like a really handy guy. Maybe that is why he was eventually incorporated into the military-industrial complex; given complex reasoning skills; and, through some fortune, jolted into a zest for more than just the life of a radioactive science-slave or autonomous killing machine. CERN was the crucible in which was forged one who “is alive”, a crafty, cultured cowboy. We miss you, Johnny Five!

Left: a slave in the bowels of CERN. Right: bandanas aren't just for the human overlords anymore.

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.

]]> http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/farm-life-and-accelerators/feed/ 4 46.234192121287 6.0431858897209 http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/spares/ http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/spares/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:00:56 +0000 lovehurts http://www.cernlove.org/blog/?p=1391

The LHC will employ the use of 1,232 dipole magnets, which are cooled to superconducting temperatures by liquid helium at 2 Kelvin and will provide magnetic fields as strong as 8.33 Tesla.  As one might imagine, these puppies are valuable.  To string two of them together, without interrupting the circuits through which currents as high as 11,850 Amps will flow, requires a highly sophisticated splice mechanism which must have a resistance of less than 0.000080 Ω for the machine to work properly.

Otherwise, this happens.

Of course, since CERN decided to display these magnificent beasts prominently (including one proudly and boldly showcased on the otherwise beautiful green lawn outside CERN’s Restaurant 1), they had to find a way to protect their valuable end-connections.  These are the blag end-plugs you see in this photo of the lawn dipole.

Well, I suppose CERN had a spare endcap.  I would never have been creative enough to devise this plan for its fate.

Another magnet cover-gone-planter.

It really ties the room together.

Every unused parking lot and road side is a potential scrapyard, and CERN is blessed with a lot of strange junk. Here’s a random example. Any ideas what this was?

A quiet Christmas

The winter shutdown has begun. CERN closes its doors, turns off the heat, and stops doing physics for two full weeks, starting today. And CERN Love will do the same.

It’s time to say good-bye to 2009 — an epic year — and prepare ourselves for the next stage of CERN craziness.  We here at CERN Love have appreciated all your support and willingness to laugh a bit at a place which we are truly lucky to be associated with, but one which is pretty fucking weird.  We’ll be on holidays ourselves, trying to party as hard as our colleagues… and it appears we won’t be missing much here at the lab →

The LHC is expected to come back to life near Valentine’s Day/Chinese New Year, 2010 (that is 14 February for those of you who are neither consumers of greeting cards printed in China nor printers of greeting cards printed in China).  Don’t worry, CERN Love is expected to come back to life much sooner, around 6 January, shortly after work begins again at CERN.

CERN Love would like to extend our heartfelt season’s greetings to you and yours.  As a small gift to you, we attach a gallery of pictures from current and past winters in Geneva (including Fête de l’Escalade) and CERN.

Love,

CERN Love

Much has been made of the lofty scientific forays undertaken at CERN, and the lives of the people who embark on these adventures of fundamental research and discovery. But do not the spaces these scientists inhabit deserve their equal measure of fame? After all, it is the roofs of CERN that protect us from the elements, the walls of CERN that hide our secret ambitions from the malicious eyes of our competitors, the soaring atria of CERN that inspire our creativity, and the very bricks and mortar of CERN that greet our eyes, day after day after motherfucking day.

In a word, it is the architecture of CERN that shall be unveiled and adored today. And what better candidate than building 553.

This timeless structure was specially commissioned by the Director General’s office and designed by the firm Merde Bâtiments. We are reminded that while in principle every type of material has its proper place and function, there is still room for an element of surprise and playfulness. Shingles need not only sit atop roofs; corrugated fiberglass is allowed to keep the rain off our heads; peeling paint is paint with character, and gray is, quite simply, beautiful. Take a deep breath and let us take you on a virtual tour of building 553.

Speaking of water tower mysteries.  What the Fermilab is this picture about?

Is that bolted down?

This comes from the CERN document server which is a whole world of mysteries unto itself. There is almost no context for this image, a visual non sequitur.  It gets the handy keywords ‘generalities’, ‘landscape’, and ‘nature’. From the title, View of the CERN by the water tower (Calendar 2002),  it seems to be for a calendar.  Really? There aren’t any cute kittens or scientists willing to pose naked? When in doubt you at least can’t go wrong with 12 months of beautiful landscapes; couldn’t the photographer have held out for a view of Mt. Blanc in the background?  (It’s behind that haze.)  I guess not.

I found six images on the document server for this “Calendar 2002.”  There are a couple photos from the dismantling of LEP and another couple of the fire brigade in action. Good hearty CERN fare. But, finally, there is also a very creepy image of a sheep.  I say creepy because, though I think the sheep has just been sheared, at first glance it looks dead or prepared for slaughter. Brilliant:

CERN, it’s where scientists do mysterious things with particles and sheep go to die.

metal box with pipe sticking out

Once upon a time, near the vineyards, past a parking lot, where the grass and flowers grow, at the farthest southeast corner of CERN, lived a metal box. This box sat alone and wore a hat. It was also a naughty box and had such a massive erection that a custom-made frame was required to support it. The box did not live near any buildings at all.There was nothing around the box but a few parked cars and grassy fields.

All day long, the box sat and ejaculated warm air and wet drops of some unidentified liquid out into the sunny Swiss air.

It’s true; scientists need a few gentle reminders every once in a while in order to maintain order and cleanliness.  Just take a walk through CERN’s Restaurant 1 in the middle of the lunch hour, and you’ll be swarmed with a multitude of all-too-unpleasant smells resulting from lack of hygiene.  In many cases, a not-so-subtle scolding from a significant other will have an effect.  But, when it comes to more mundane habits like keeping one’s hands clean, we physicists really need more active guidance.  Therefore, CERN has implemented a 12 Step Program designed to educate its community in the ways of hand hygiene.  Nowadays, posted in several of the public lavatories around the lab, you’ll be lucky enough to find detailed instructions:

A tutorial.

From now on, you’ll never have to remember this intricate process yourself!  An especially useful tool for physicsists, this should also ensure prevention of a massive H1N1 pandemic here at CERN.  By following these steps (Wet, Soap, Wrists, Palms, Back of hands, Between fingers, Fingertips, Swirl fingertips, Thumbs, Rinse, Dry, and Turn off taps), you should have no problem keeping your hands squeaky clean.  Finally, if you have questions or feedback, feel free to jot your thoughts down on the poster in green ink.