I'm still ahead of the tiredness that'll inevitably will fall on my shoulders after the trip that just ended this morning, though I feel in my bones that soon it'll catch me and I'll feel the hangover of those days shared with some 15 journalists from all over the world who were granted a quick peek to one of the meccas of the world's physics, the CERN, now called Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire.
CERN, located in the outskirts of Geneve, is home to a particle accelerator that has a ring with a 27 kilometer diameter. There you'll find working more than seven thousand scientists from many countries (including two teams of mexican researchers) in collaborative projects that involve tens and tens of experts in the most arcane branches of physics.
A particle accelerator is based in a simple premise: smash things together and see what happens. But something that is simple at a macro level gets more and more difficult as you shrink dimensiones, as is the case in the CERN's accelerators.
The star in the complex is the famed Large Hadron Collider, LHC, which last year had what they call an "incident". In short, there was an accident that smashed part of the ring and delayed for almost a year the beginning of experiments.
We found with some surprise that scientists there speak freely and candidly about the, er, incident. They say the scale of the variables associated with the LHC's operation could only be tested once the ring was completed, and they readily admit that they were hurried and did not execute all quality tests they are now finishing, once the accident happened.
Scientists and communicators showed us the four big experiments that'll be operating in the four collision points defined in CERN's large ring: ATLAS, LHCb, CMS and ALICE. We have mexican scientists working in two of them.
We had an opportunity to see the long LHC's ring segments, we got into the CERN's main control center and were taken almost 100 meters below the surface to have a close look at the monumental CMS instrument. All in all, we saw some of the most advanced hardware scientists want to use to uncover the most interesting secrets of the universe. Best of all? Everybody's passion; their complete commitment to their science.
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