Overall I thought the faculty and staff of CERN did an excellent job at making us all feel welcome and well accommodated. Many thanks to our guide for the week, Panos, who always had an agenda planned for our day!
Most of our time at CERN we were lectured to about the various laws of physics that have been so far been discovered, followed by more brief conversations about what is currently unclear and in the experimental zone of our understanding. In addition to these many conversations and lectures about particle physics we were given the rare opportunity to enter underground into the experimental room in which particles are being collided together and studied for their reactions. These rooms are enormous caverns around one hundred meters underground, spanning a length width and depth of fifty by forty by forty meters, depending on the experiment. These rooms house the worlds most intensely dense and technologically advanced machines known as the detectors. These machines are the devices that record the information produced from the collision of different particles after they have traveled around the large circular collider.
Everyone who works at CERN has an agenda to be productive and it is apparent that this system has catalyzed their growth in a lot of ways. However, I would like to unpack this because I think there are subtle setbacks that actually hamper the potential of such a campus. To be solely productive is almost always accompanied by sacrifices in other areas or departments. This is an apparent re-occurrence at CERN in which most of the faculty will agree that the majority of funding should be directed toward the production and maintenance of the collider tunnel, detectors, and magnets. Some of this mentality to take care of the machines and put the technology before the campus and the people it houses has degraded the way in which people experience CERN, both as a visitor and also as a working resident. The current campus does not keep workers in permanent housing but rather acts as a daily work-site for the scientist and a hotel for temporary visitors such as ourselves.
I am extremely grateful to have experienced so many rare opportunities, and having clearly been exposed to and invaluable amount of information I realize the significance of our visit. The new Future Circular Collider is a project which should look gain knowledge by looking toward various fields whose expertise deals with human needs as well as machines. It is an important relationship that we need to work on to better understand how they can begin to compliment each other rather than oppose.
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