pouët.net

I landed an internship in this joint and found that there seems to be no knowledge of any kind about the scene. Is this really true?

Geneva area people still count too.

2 people from CERN were at this years breakpoint, so that might not be entirely true. :)

<particle joke>

Are you hoping to beat Smash's particle record?

Dunno if he's actually working in the CERN but I think I remember angel of calodox told me at breakpoint08 he was working around this topic.

did the particles collide yet ?

The scene got so much experience with dots we could simulate an LHC on a 386.

but it would only run on nvidia.

did the buckyballs touch?

they have computers that can beat your computers!

their cpu cooling system is awesome

collision detection.. umm

nice one for landing an internship at CERN, two of my mates have done internships/placements there, while studying. They both said they pretty much did nothing while there though, but is good on a CV atleast! :D

Unless you work on some engineering topic, you are probably going to spend years waiting for beam time and analyzing old data. This sounds only amazing if you're that special kind of person.

I always found it ironic that most Nobel prices related to particle physics were awared to engineers who improved the accelerators. (Stochastic cooling, the bubble chamber, etc...)

well, that sure sounds like a waste of a whole lot of money to me then... unless there's real scientific benefit somewhere in the future of course. until now i always get the feeling of "why do we do it? because we can!".

I'm actually working on the internal infrastructure, I'm not a phycist myself, so as devistator said : doing nothing or close to nothing ;) May be just enough time and boredom to finally start doing a demo.

hcdlt : if youre talking about commercial value - there's absolutely none in high energy physics, or at least not in another 30-50 yrs according to the phycist who i share an office with. scientific value tho, pretty sure we do produce some.

hcdlt: it's somewhat 'wildcard' research: nobody really knows where it'll lead or what benefits we'll get at the end. Nobody would have predicted xrays or atomic energy (or the atom bomb!) when people first started looking at radiation. And who would have predicted computers when they first started playing with electricity? :)

don't get me wrong... i am convinced that scientific research does't have to be benefit-oriented, especially when it comes to physics. but in this particular case i always wonder whether the research is really worth the effort, because there really is a lot involved. i sure hope so.
but reading something like "doing nothing or close to nothing" sure sounds like there's room for improvement to spend less money. back at my girlfriend's and my own university i always got the impression that there's a lot of money just wasted in science.

just wasted = just getting wasted

There are benefits to having a scientific institution in your city and why it makes a lot of sense to use good chunk of public funding to foster even basic science. First, there are many secondary results that may find real world applications. The most prominent example here is probably the WWW. Then you should not forget that science is not a lifelong career for most of the involved people. You basically fund education of very highly skilled people who can be employed by local companies.

... and so on.

you dont find anything if you dont look!

Try looking for Movi - Polish demoscene watcher :) he started working at cern around two months ago or so.

kbi: he's the one who opened the thread, right? :)

lol