Early morning start on the parking lot outside of CERN: Sunrise, and a fantastic alpine panorama.
Finally some down-time – in seat 3F on the late evening flight from Geneva to Munich. All week has been exceptionally busy: I attended the International Workshop on Linear Colliders (IWLC) in Geneva. This workshop, for the first time, truly combined the CLIC in ILC communities, both on the accelerator side and on the physics and detector side in one single meeting. Not surprisingly, it was a very big meeting, beyond what could be hosted at CERN. That is why we spent most of the week in a conference center of Geneva. A very nice facility, but with one down-side: To keep my travel budget from a complete disaster this year, I was staying in the CERN hostel, which meant leaving for the conference center with a bus at 7:45 each morning… That translates to getting up at 6:30, not exactly my favorite time. Especially since conferences always mean very late nights, due to drinks with colleagues and work on talks.
The CERN DG, consulting a "crystal ball" during the conference dinner.
This time, things were even more tough than usual: I gave the summary talk of the Top/QCD, Electroweak and Alternative Physics session. Such a task means that the last night of the conference is completely spent preparing the talk for the next (final) morning… And often, that is the evening of the conference dinner. Not so this time, the (admittedly fantastic) dinner was on Wednesday, much more summary-speaker friendly.
Stress, lack of sleep and all, the meeting was absolutely worth it. A lot of interesting talks, good discussions, and a highlight: Rolf Heuer, General Director of CERN, looking into his Crystal Ball. Apparently he saw 2025 as the physics start date for a Linear Collider – but he did not want to assign a confidence level to this, I guess the crystal ball still needs some calibration…
