This photo clearly indicates what the dress code is at CERN: yellow helmets for employees, red helmets for guests. So Hubert Herwig (head of lowering CMS) is wearing yellow headgear and cameraman Sander Snoep (right) and interviewer Jan van den Berg (left) are each wearing a red safety helmet.
That said, here is our question to the audience, based on the photo above: How did Jan manage to get a hold of a yellow (!) helmet? Answers can be sent up until the film’s premiere to: info@theateradhoc.nl
Jan’s finger is pointing to a comment we discovered on a whiteboard in the CMS cavern, 100 meters below the earth: “There is no Higgs!!!”
Whether the Russian announcement at the top of the same board provides information that is supplementary or contradictory to this, is something we are currently still investigating.
Over the last few months the various components of the CMS detector have been lowered into the ground one by one. Such manoeuvres take about 10 hours each time, because each section weighs a cool 200 tons and has to descend 100 meters to the hall beneath the ground. There, the entire contraption will finally be assembled. Although we have made many visits to CMS over the last few years, it still remains impossible to adequately describe what you see there. We are inclined to say that the combination of heavy metals and ultra modern computer technology most resembles “the construction of a spaceship”, but seeing as we have never experienced that from close up, we have no means of substantiating the comparison whatsoever. So we’ll just refer you to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
And to give you some idea of the size of the colossus, we have added the photo below.
The past few days we have been at CERN filming the ‘lowering’ of the last component of the CMS detector that was still above ground.
From afar, the CMS hall looks rather lonely and deserted, but that’s more than compensated by the natural setting of the Jura Mountains and the Alps in the distance. The villages in the immediate vicinity have been promised that the largest part of the hall will be demolished soon, now that the CMS detector has arrived at its final destination (100 meters below ground). Then the inhabitants of Cessey will once again have an unobstructed view of the mountains, and CMS, hopefully, of HIGGS.
Cameraman Sander Snoep and sound engineer Gideo Bijlsma
© photography Hannie van den Bergh
De Wereld Draait Door
Dutch television show, we apologize to all non-dutch visitors
Interview with Jos Engelen, director of CERN, in De Wereld Draait Door.
Watch the interview online…
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