Seeing CERN

Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit one of the places that I really have wanted to see eversince we arrived to this part of Switzerland a year ago. We went to the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN as it normally is called. A 27km circular particle accelerator 100m under the ground in the south western tip of Switzerland and eastern France. In the accelerator - also called the Large Hydron Collidor or LHC - two beams of protons are accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light in opposite directions and are then brought to collisions. The aim is to recreate the conditions that existed when the universe was created with the big bang billions of years ago. Nothing less. The aim is to understand what matter (and anti-matter) is made of. More specifically they are looking for the Higgs boson, which the Standard Model claims exist, but which has never been observed.

Enormous amounts of information is created at the collision, more than it is physically possible to store. CERN is therefore always at the forefront at information technology. That also goes for sharing of the information that is created. Due to the nature of the organization, that consists of thousands of scientists in universities all over the planet it was necessary to create an efficient way of distributing the information efficiently. CERN therefore became the birthplace of the worldwide web.

The visit was arranged by Professor Donald Marchand who has been studying the collaborative decision processes in CERN the last two years and by our own classmate Paolo Guglielmini [Italy], who worked in CERN before joining IMD. It was fascinating to hear both their perspectives!

CERN gathers the best brains from around the world and has several Nobel price winners in its history books. You can clearly feel how passionate the people are at being at the frontier of what mankind knows. They are out there where the building blocks of life, parallel universes and unknown dimensions are part of the everyday discussion.

As Donald said at one point: "These people are every day at the edge of what humans cans understand". One of my good classmates added "and he is not even talking about group dynamics" (referring to our leadership sessions with Professor Jack Wood).

A Spanish scientist explained how a typical experiment typically runs over 10 hours in what to us seemed like a pretty tedious and boring process, but when Fadi Sbaiti asked him: 'So where is the excitement?' he answered with a big smile 'What do you mean?'. How could we not be excited about this? We later learned that they actually had set a new world record that day!

The state-of-the-art control room of ATLAS, the newest of the four detectors along the LHC. ATLAS detects the particles that are created at the collisions of the protons.

Ready for a 3D movie!

Part of the LHC control room.

Paolo Guglielmini telling about how fascinating it was to work at CERN.

A quick jump back to IMD. I have been waiting anxiously for months to take this picture. Juan Benitez (far left) is out of a family with a very special set of names. Juan's full name is Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's father (far right) is also Juan Manuel Benitez. Juan's brother (nr. 2 from the left) is Juan Nicolas Benitez and there is yet another brother (not here) named Juan Camilo Benitez, so all in all, a family with four Juan Benitez. Amazing, isn't it?
Lately, yet another brother has sneaked into the family. Our classmate Gerrit from Germany (nr. 2 from the right) visited Juan's family last week in Colombia (see below picture) and immediately felt at home. We therefore now call him Juan Gerrit Benitez! :-)

Gerrit with the rest of the Benitez family in Colombia last week.

Thorsten