Today put a more contemporary spin on things, with visits to ALICE and CMS, two detectors / experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. As the LHC is 27 kilometres in circumference (and 100 metres underground), it is an 8 km drive across to CMS, which is on the opposite side of the LHC to the main CERN site. It was a kind of nostalgic to visit the CMS complex, as I have been there several times over the years (it also reminded me of feeling overwhelmed and wondering what i was doing there).

We took the lift down 80 metres, to the top access tunnel airlock, but that’s as far as we could go, as the LHC is currently active (and thus producing vast amounts of radiation from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy produced in these particle collision detectors 40 million times a second).

Even though the 10 metre thick concrete walls I could kind of feel the energies, or at least the intense magnetic fields coming from the Compact Muon Solenoid. Around its core is the most powerful superconducting magnet in the world, focusing the energy emissions from the subatomic particle collisions within. It was making my telephone camera do weird things… but I got some photos before it fuzzed out, including one of a lo-fi field detector,  a chain of paperclips hanging from a pipe, which was bending in a curve, showing the form of the magnetic field.

(here is a photo I took of the CMS detector in 2016)