Our first stop, however, would the great physics laboratory. I had been delighted that Okki wanted to see it. We had originally planned to visit on Sunday, after which Okki could drop me off at Geneva Airport for my flight. But it turned out that the visitor center at CERN was closed on Sunday, a fact I found out from their website, the use of which bears the irony of it being the first ever home page on the world wide web. I had used it on the command line in 1991, before web browsers existed, typing www cern.ch in order to access their Esperanto language course.
Now I was using it to close in on CERN itself. I had many reasons for going there, not the least of which was the coolness of it all, to visit such a facility, but also with the agenda I had in mind, with the talk I was going to give in Prague in just a few days.
We took the elevator to the basement and retrieved Okki's small sedan, recently purchased while he was in Spain, and then navigated the treacherous driveway up to the street, with the necessary use of convex windows on both ends. I could now understand why Okki hadn't offered to pick me up at the station. It was hassle getting in and out.
He programmed CERN into the GPS system and it took us through Lausanne down the road that accessed to motorway, and we zipped westward through the green lush landscape along the lake toward Geneva.
On the way, I told Okki a few things about CERN he might want to know, trying always the perspective of someone familiar with such facilities, and with the people who work in them, and moreover about the theory they were purporting to explore, with the great instruments they had built there.
I mentioned I sent to him and Stefan an email a couple weeks prior, joking that we could go to CERN together, and then stage a performance of a play by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, called Die Physiker ("The Physicists)", which was written after World War II and set in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
The story is rather twisted, legitimately in the genre of horror. It is set in a mental institution called, in French, Les Cerisiers, (The Cherry Trees) (a reference to Chekhov, certainly). When I first saw the play in 1988 it was being staged by the theater department of my university in Oregon, which I had started in 1985 after my last visit in Lausanne. When I saw the people, I was within weeks of leaving, having presumably fulfilled all the requirements for a physics degree.
It had been the last thing I thought I would do when I went there in 1985, to study physics and be a physics major. But because I'd been traveling abroad out-of-touch in Europe that summer, I had not responded to the card they sent, that I was to send back, indicating my preference for a faculty advisor in the department I wanted to make my home. So they gave a physics professor, a rather odd-looking Canadian balding but with a long white beard akin to an old testament prophet, as my grandfather would say, upon seeing his photograph. I'd been so intrigued by him I had decided to take his introductory physics class as part of the classical quadrivium-trivium curriculum I was determined to make for myself while there.
One thing had led to another, and I'd wound up being a physics major, and then going to graduate school, and getting to work with some of the greatest minds on the planet who are physicists, some of whose was the subject of the ongoing research at CERN.
After all this, I was heading there with an agenda. I wanted to check it over, and feel the reality of it. I didn't need a lab tour. I knew what labs looked like. I just needed to see what was there on site above ground, and a little of what was below. Most of all I wanted to lose all inhibition about talking about it. I wanted to remind myself of the people who had spent their lives and careers there, and who enormous professional reputations, even among the lay community, to uphold.
I wanted to do this because in a few days I intended to tell a room full of very learned and sharp-minded physicists in Prague that I was confident that one could discuss the possibility thatphysics had been off track since perhaps 1930, and that most everything in fundamental particle physics since about 1962, including all results coming out of CERN, was rank bullshit.
No comments:
Post a Comment