It’s Day 1 and it’s already begun!

Touched down in Geneva around dawn after a 24+ hour series of flights, got to CERN and initially hit by a quasi-paradoxical bureaucracy loop, trying to re-activate my access but needing to get onto the CERN network to get access to get onto the CERN network to activate my access etc, delirious meetings at the user office, filling out online forms repeatedly, then when it’s ready to press submit, a sudden flash of dark and a blackout knocked the whole system out (and that’s before breakfast and after 24 hrs without sleep).

Then a series of spontaneous meetings, with old collaborators suddenly popping up within minutes, like getting the band back together! But the highlight was when I first arrived on site, wandering down familiar old corridors (and seeing even a few traces of my previous projects still here and there!) The main CERN complex is a vast labyrinth of labs and offices that  become increasingly old and industrial, with a unique dusty acrid smell. Somehow I was drawn by chance, yet perhaps inexorably, to the first CERN experiment, the SynchroCyclotron from 1957, a massive magnet around a round accelerator about 10 metres wide (inactive yet still slightly radioactive after all these years).