Yesterday’s big event was the LHC official inauguration, at which I was present to represent CMS to the various delegations. This was a great experience, it is very interesting to meet the people who make decisions about how we are funded and explain (hopefully in a successful way) why the studies we will do at the LHC are essential for the understanding of how nature and the universe work. It was definitely very tiring, there was a party afterwards for the CERN employees and I did not even go as I was too exhausted from talking to country representatives all day, including the heads of the two major US funding agencies, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. I very much hope I managed to convey how exciting and groundbreaking the research is that we do, anyway I definitely had fun.
Communicating science comes in many forms. Like every large organization, both ATLAS and CMS have public news letters which deal with what is going on with the collaboration and its people. In CMS this is the CMS times, an electronic news letter that deals with everything happening and relevant to CMS. The CMS times is definitely recommended reading for the thousands CMS collaborators, but I think it also provides a very interesting look into our world for anyone else. Free to take a look if you’re interested in what goes on at CERN in a large collaboration, it is not all physics, there is loads of engineering and just ‘people news’ as well.
This week’s issue of the CMS times has a nice plug for the US LHC blogs by Sue Ann, who also talks about her life outside physics and the joy of small cultural differences between the USA and Europe. In web cast!
Tags: "small world", CMS, outreach, people
