Last month, Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel-winning physicist was to give a talk here but the organizers had underestimated the number of physicists who showed up.[break]
The crowd was moved to a larger amphitheater across the hallway. But there aren’t that many people here today, and we aren’t here for a lecture or a conference on quantum theory. Cell phones are turned off and the lights go out.
I put on my headphones. We’re here to watch a movie.
Besides high-powered complicated scientific research, there are other activities that go on at CERN that keep people sane. On certain evenings, the Cine Club shows movies and this time it is Angels and Demons, based on Dan Brown’s novel.
What better place to watch the movie than the location where the movie begins, the lab where antimatter is produced?
Not to confuse this article with a review of the movie. Since its 2009 release, many reviews have already been written on Angels and Demons.
This is not meant to devalue the entertainment factor of the movie, either. Angels and Demons quite successfully stays even a skeptical audience’s attention with its ticking clock and imminent sense of danger.
This is not a rebuttal of the misleading ideas that the movie evokes, CERN has an FAQ page for that. It is more a meandering of thoughts between the glamour of science that Hollywood produces and what actually exists in these otherwise drab hallways, badly-lit offices and architecturally unimpressive buildings.
The difference between the real and the projected. The idea that fantastic props need to be in place in order to do fantastic things.
There are many people here at CERN. Mostly physicists, technicians, and engineers. There are many visitors. There are many students.
There are many visiting students. “A group of visiting students requested Angels and Demons to be screened, after a discussion on antimatter,” said the Cine Club’s organizer after the movie ended.
On weekday afternoons, the CERN restaurants are crowded with touring students, engineers, scientists, professors, and their families.
The babble of language is a representation of almost all the countries in the world, a small microcosm. But I have yet to see a physicist running around in a white lab coat like Vittoria Vetra does.
I have yet to see them rushing about looking like they’re working on important things.
Most of the scientists inhabit rather modest-looking offices, usually sharing space with a few other colleagues. Some of them prefer to work in the small library (open 24/7), which houses only a handful of fiction books, seven of which are copies of Angels and Demons.
Quite frequently, Nobel laureates wander the hallways looking rather lost or sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a coffee cup.
CERN’s website acknowledges that the World Wide Web was invented here but unlike the Universe of Particles exhibition where Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal paper is housed in a large representation of proton under neon lights and effects that merit sci-fi films, his office was located in one of the narrow, rather badly-lit hallways.
There’s a plaque punctuating the corridor to commemorate the birth of the WWW, a phenomenon that changed the way we live today.
Opposite the plaque is a door plastered with comic strips and further down, a large poster of Homer Simpson saying “D’oh” and a rather modest sign stating the birth of The One programming language.
If you wander through hallways of CERN, most doors have comic strips on them and even the exit signs that lead from the Visitor’s Center to the main buildings are cartoons.
On weekends, there’ll be people working in their offices, lights streaming out of doorways into dim corridors. But that doesn’t mean that all CERN people do is work.
In the restaurant, the brightly-lit spaces are inhabited by gamers. On any given time of day, even while Europe is having its coldest winter, there’ll be someone cycling or running on the roads that have been named Route Einstein, Route Babbage, or Route Feynman.
There are interesting talks and lectures and colloquiums all year round. And there are movie screenings.
Where is all this meandering leading to?
After the movie is over and the audience has left, I wander through the hallways of CERN, looking for light switches so I can find my way to the exit.
Tom Hanks’ rather flat performance and the rather flat aftertaste of the mediocre movie script still play in my head. With all its flashy illustrations, Hollywood and the media often miss out on something that has struck me as most fantastic about this place.
It is not the gigantic experiments and the many computer firms, the powerful accelerators and mind-boggling theories, it is not the Nobel laureates who grace the hallways. It is not their search for the understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.
It is the nature of collaboration, the manner in which scientists and professionals from all over the world have come together to question, criticize, experiment, verify and continue working with each other on their often rather vague quests.
WHAT IS CERN
CERN stands for the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research.
It started as a provisional body in 1952 with the mandate of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. Back then, pure physics research concentrated on understanding the inside of the atom, hence ‘nuclear.’
In 1954, the Council was dissolved and a new organization was formed with the title European Organization for Nuclear Research. However, it kept its name CERN.
Today, CERN’s main area of research is particle physics, the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them. The lab houses some of the most powerful particle accelerators and detectors.
It has become one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. The quest here is to find the most basic constituents of matter and study what happens when such particles collide in order to understand the laws of Nature.
The CERN lab houses lies on the Franco-Swiss border and has 20 European member states.
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