That’s apparently a quote from Yogi Berra1. It seems appropriate for a number of reasons.
Here I am in Geneva Airport writing a blog post again after a week of ATLAS meetings. For a couple of years when I was coordinating an ATLAS physics group and had a page at The Guardian2, this was a weekly routine. That’s not quite the case now, but I am coming here a bit more often again since for various reasons, including trying to coordinate the outreach and education activities of the collaboration. Not entirely coincidentally, the ATLAS blog has restarted, including the post I highlighted a few days ago.
Another blast from the past is that on Wednesday I went down the pit to see ATLAS itself. I have been down there a lot, but not recently, and things are changing. The detector is being opened up so the middle bit can be replaced as part of our high-luminosity upgrade. The picture on the left above shows one of the muon detector wheels, the blue cylinder is the shielding around the LHC beampipe (now disconnected). The scale may not be not obvious, but the zoom on the right shows the next group of ATLAS physicists beginning their tour. Which hopefully makes the point; it’s big.
A final, and less welcome, sense of déjà vu comes from the fact the much of the talk at CERN is about cuts to UK physics. In fact some of that is worse I’ve seen before. But more of that elsewhere and later, I fear.
To finish on a positive note (and on the Elizabeth Line now), my PhD student Mark got a prize. I say “my student”, but in this part of his work he was supervised by Tim Martin, I just watched and admired. Well done Mark.
