My office at CERN.
I’m curious to know what the best-looking office is at CERN. (If you know someone or if you think your office would be in the running for that let me know and I can post a picture!)
From what I’ve personally seen, most offices here aren’t all that different from mine. A little cramped, but at least they have big windows. The plant was my own doing – and it is still a little pathetic now due to a lack of watering over the holidays in December.
Looking at that picture now it just occurred to me you would notice we use mac laptops (mine is plugged into a monitor). The use of macs among high energy physicists is pretty high – higher than the overall population – and I wonder how it became that way?
Tags: student life
” The use of macs among high energy physicists is pretty high – higher than the overall population – and I wonder how it became that way? ”
I think you can thank the fine job of software engineering that is the Windows OS.
I thought various Linux distros would be the most common. Isn’t detector software mostly run on Linux? I even seem to recall that CERN has it’s own distro.
Obvious what the answer to your question is!
Macs, since OS X, have a BSD unix foundation. (As well as the pretty GUI on top for those who don’t want to know how their machine really works.)
Physicists, like astronomers – particularly experimentalists – love unix and must use it for data analysis. So why wouldn’t HEP experimentalists and theorists want a Mac? I know I buy nothing else for myself, my postdocs and grad students.
@Ohman
Linux is definitely the most common on desktops and processing nodes. Physicists just buy laptops and use those to connect (ssh) to linux boxes and do the bulk of work. Finalizing plots and presentations is usually done directly on the laptop.