It has been a bit of a week. I am just back from the Congress Centre – which is a hall underneath Congress House, the headquarters of the TUC – where I was a late stand-in as a speaker on the ATLAS experiment at an impressive “Instant Expert” event organised by New Scientist. Quite a lot of people had decided that learning about particle physics was a good way to spend a Saturday and of course I agree. It was a very engaging audience, lots of fun.

It is de rigeur in particle physics talks to show a picture of yourself underground in a CERN hard-hat, and I managed to update mine yesterday, just in time for the talk, because UCL top brass were visiting CERN, which meant not only did I get to see my own experiment for the first time since I was down there with Robin Ince, I also got to stand in the LHC tunnel. The visit was rewarding in several ways, and I hope UCL and CERN will soon be taking some mutual advantage from engineering and teacher-training related expertise and opportunities, as well as more in the particle physics and AI/Machine Learning areas where we already do very well.

We also had some good discussions with Mark Thomson, the new CERN Director-General Elect, who until the end of December was executive chair STFC, our funding agency in the UK. I wonder if the fact that someone from the UK can be elected to such a position is a sign that the standing of the UK in Europe is beginning to recover a bit post Brexit. If so, I hope it continues to the extent that, for example, one day we can use the electronic passport gates in Hamburg and Geneva, just as the Germans and Swiss can use ours in Heathrow. Anyway, it is good news.

I mention Hamburg there because, working backwards, on Monday and Tuesday I was in Hamburg helping DESY prepare for a review of the lab. DESY hosted the first experiment I worked on as a particle physicist, and I have many fond memories of Hamburg. I also remember living there when we had the freedom to move there and get jobs without pointless expense and bureaucracy. No longer, thanks to Boris Johnson et al.

Back to Congress House, if you are still with me in this slightly stream-of-consciousness diary entry… We were asked at the end to name our favourite physicist. A very tricky question, I am not good at heroes. I first answered Dirac (whose picture and equation are on the slide above). But I cheated and added another – Isidore Rabi. He appears in the recent Oppenheimer film. He refused to join the Los Alamos project, but he got the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. Post second world war he was influential in the founding of both the Brookhaven Lab on Long Island and CERN. Bit of hero, possibly. Certainly I would like to see a film about him. Maybe it could be called Oppenheimer II, since sequels seem to be in vogue.

PS Added 22/1/25, UCL news item on the visit.