This is the second episode in a series of stories about people and life at CERN, inspired by the six years I spent there as a staff member in a managerial role.
Previous episodes
First Episode
DISCLAIMER: this is NOT my own diary. Just reality-inspired fiction!
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The Orc in the Cavern
After one full week in office, I am getting to know the key facts and the names of the main characters I need to come to terms with.
First lesson: in my position, I need to interact both with the scientists and with the admin guys. Needless to say, these communities tend not to understand each other. I am the man to build bridges.
First task: go and meet a few powerful guys and gals across the Organization to establish contacts and convince them that I am not an idiot…
Being a physicist myself, I feel that speaking to physicists first is a good idea, so I take an appointment with MagnetBoss. He is the man who is in charge of quality control on the superconducting magnets.
He suggested that we meet in the ATLAS cavern, because he´s very busy supervising the installation of the last few magnets for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These magnets are very amazing objects: they are hosted in big blue metal pipes (14.3 metres long), they are hugely powerful (generating a magnetic field up to 7.7 Tesla) and…. very, very cool, since they must be kept at a temperature of 1.9 degrees Kelvin, which is cooler than the temperature in outer space. Incidentally, that´s why some hopeless nerds love to say that CERN is the coolest place in the universe!
For sure, lowering, installing and testing such magnets in the ATLAS cavern, located 100 meters below ground, is not child´s play (see the picture below).
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All in all, I suppose MagnetBoss has some good reasons to be nervous and somewhat rough to deal with. He´s in charge of a critical component in a 9-billion-dollar project…
don't forget to follow
Now I´m in the cavern, and MagnetBoss is not around, as far as I can see. Lots of technicians are working on the installation of the ATLAS detector, a huge (46 m long, 25 m high and 25 m wide), 7000-tonne beast hosted in the cavern. To me, they look like busy bees in their brood comb.
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There is strange, loud background noise. I ask a Project Associate guy:
“Have you seen MagnetBoss?”
“Don’t you hear him…?”, he replies, smiling. Then I realize that the background noise is in fact a very loud man’s voice coming from behind a sort of wall made of hundreds of electronic devices, thick copper wire, helmets and God knows what else.
I am given a helmet and I eventually make my way to the source of the noise. Now I see from behind a plump man, probably in his mid-40s, talking to a few young technicians, with a strong Glaswegian accent. I wouldn’t say he’s yelling at them, but his voice is very loud and the techs look stressed, if not scared.
I get closer and call his name twice, but he cannot hear me. He’s clearly deafened by his own voice. Eventually, I put my hand on his shoulder. He’s wearing a thick sweater. His shoulder feels wet and warm, so I figure that the man must be sweating like crazy.
He stops speaking, turns around and stares at me. A big round face. Pale blue eyes, red cheeks, black beard. He makes me think of a character I met in a pub in Glasgow a few years ago. It ended up in a huge pub fight…
“Hi, I am the new guy in charge of knowledge management in your department. We have an appointment.”
He goes: “Hi”. Then he turns back and resumes his “conversation” with the young guys.
I am so surprised by his attitude that I spend the next 45 seconds just listening to what he says. I gather that they have just identified a critical issue in relation to the magnets, with a potential risk of magnet quenching. This phenomenon, triggered by a sudden loss of superconductivity in the magnet, is everybody’s nightmare – just imagine a high-speed train running at 300mph on smooth, high-performance rails being suddenly switched onto old, rusty, crumpled rails…dangerous, isn’t it?
I touch him again. He turns to me again.
“I’ll come back tomorrow”.
“Thank you”. This time he smiles at me.
Despite appearances, my first, short meeting with a CERN big shot was a success. Now he knows I am not an idiot who doesn’t understand what a quench would mean for the project.
Next time he will listen to me.