On the nature of transience

Firstly... welcome to the third attempt at making this blog actually something I update frequently! After failing epicly last time, I thought I'd stop making fuck tons of potential topics and then forgetting them, and basically just stick to once a week, because that's at least compatible with my laziness.

Right, for the introduction. I'm one Hugo Day. A PhD student nominally associated with the University of Manchester/Cockcroft Institute in the UK, but in reality working at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border. I started as a student in October 2009, Coming to CERN for about 3 weeks in November 2009, and am working here full time as of 8th February 2010. I work on the area of accelerator physics, the specifics of which I will probably go into at some point in the future. This is about the only important stuff there is to know. Well that and I only really speak English with a decent level of proficiency. This will probably be the source of many lulz/fails in the future.

This is my place to... well write whatever the hell I like really. We'll see what happens otherwise. If you want some of the actions of my past times at CERN, read below. More might appear with time. Angry monkeys!

So, what to lead on this little rebirth? I thought of doing the science, but I need some photos for that first. Then I thought of Geneva, but I'll come to that later. Then I thought of one of the more unknown parts of being here... the transient population. People coming and people fro-ing all the time.

CERN is a funny place. There are always people coming and going. Literally, it operates 24 hours a day, across 2 countries, operating some 40km of particle accelerator and probably over 100,000 tons of experimental equipment. As you'd expect, this produces quite a lot of need of people power. The thing is, a lot of this people power doesn't live and work at CERN normally. If you want a rough guess, maybe 10,000 people work at/with CERN. That's a lot of scientists. And engineers. And technicians. And admin staff. And librarians. And cafeteria staff. This is a BIG place. But, of those 10,000, I'd guess 4,000 are here on long term attachment (i.e. here for more than 3 months at a time). That's a full 60% of the working staff here that are in some kind of weird limbo between being here and not. Constantly.

That's 6,000 people. That's more than the population of most of the nearby towns! Just coming and going often on a weekly basis. As you can imagine, you meet a lot of people that are here for just a week or so. Take the last month for instance. Several weeks ago we had ATLAS week, where a large portion of the ATLAS collaboration (somewhere around 5-600 people I'd guess) came to CERN for a week. Then went home again. Last week was LHCb week, where again several hundred people came to CERN for only a week. As bizarre as it may sound, I ate dinner with about 3 different groups of people that week, quite aware that I wouldn't see many of them again for about 4 months, and never having met them before.

This seems to have two different effects on interactions here. Firstly, you become a hell of a lot more open about, well, everything. People are here for a week, so things happen with a reckless abandon. Want to travel into Geneva an hour from home for a meal? Done! Go climbing in the mountains on a days notice? Done and double done. Everything is more hectic, more lively, more impulsive. And the shorter the time you spend here, the more it seems to make you willing to try anything that's thrown your way.

In another way it also makes you quite closed off. Nationalities tend to clump together, sections meet each other for drinks. That small island of identity, be it through language, culture, work, make it very easy for groups to come together for short bursts and then disperse as its members again fly off over the world to wherever. This means that generally its very easy to find lots of people somewhat similar to you, but can be a right bastard to meet people outside of what might be your normal social circle. This of course being solved often by just sitting next to people and starting to talk to then.

Similarly to this, there is a very strange sense of superficialness to the whole proceedings. You can be sat next to someone for 2 hours, talking about their bitter worries and highest hopes. And then the next day you meet for coffee and have nothing better than a nod and a curt glance to give for your troubles. You are friendly to everyone because it you aren't... well you could be stuck, isolated in a place if thousands. And through what seems to be some ingrained isolation at CERN (seriously, ask how many people at CERN associated with people that don't work there. You'll find very few), if you can't socialise with the CERNois... your social life is deader faster than a fish on land.

That said, its still interesting. Most of the people here have been in the business for at least 10 years. Have lived in a couple of countries. And bizarrely above all, probably know every other bugger in their area of research. Work in vacuum systems? I bet your boss knows Bob from Fermilab that built the Tevatron's vacuum pump. Wakefields? Everyone knows Alexej Grudiev or Mr. Spataro. Its lively, vibrant and a bit mad. And damn its fun.