The other day I introduced one friend of mine to another. He asked her the obligatory “what do you do at CERN?” question. She answered that she was working on liquid argon calorimeter calibration. To which my friend promptly asked her, “No, what do you really do for CERN?” She answered without skipping a beat that she was working on Higgs to di-gluon.
There is this double life going on everywhere at CERN. As the accelerator comes closer and closer to being turned on, people are anxiously awaiting the real physics to begin. In the meantime, people are busying themselves working on hardware and calibrations.
This is not solely an artifact of timing, however. Historically in physics, one has to put in their service time before getting their hands on the real deal.
With big research projects, it takes a multiplicity of different tasks to keep the whole experiment running smoothly, not all of which are entirely glamorous. All of them are entirely necessary, though, and it takes a physicist to carry them out.
So the culture of service time gained momentum, and it really is a meritorious concept given the fact that each physicist benefiting from the use of such highly complicated machinery should have some hand in building it.
The time for service work is drawing to a close at CERN, and soon the real physics will begin with the turning on of the accelerator. However, if it were not for the completion of the service work, we would certainly never see that exhilarating day.
-Julia