CERN and the 'artisans' of the Universe
© Luca LocatelliCERN is one of the most advanced technology centers on the planet where over eleven thousand scientists from around the world are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest purpose-built and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter - the fundamental particles.
In the common imagination CERN resembles a space station where technology and humans share the last design places with an aseptic mood.
But CERN has more similarity to a huge workshop where scientists, engineers and workers collaborate together with their hand works and their brains and give back to science a familiar look.
An advanced accelerators of 27 km boost beams of particles to high energies traveling 11.000 times per second the entire ring before the beams are made to collide with each other to recreate the big-bang explosion while huge detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
When you have to solve or improve something and there's nothing that works in that way people at CERN have to find a solution and invent something that doesn’t exist. All the amazing discoveries at CERN are passed through experimental hand-made instruments. Mathematical rules and rigor combined with creativity and imagination in a unique container and able to invent tools to find and search as more as possible the basis rule of our existence. This is the process that gave to humanity many of the inventions of our times , like the World Wide Web that in 1989 was just a proposal for a more effective CERN communication system. Then the concept was implemented throughout the world.
This photos document the last days and exclusive moments where people were working shoulder to shoulder before the doors were closed during the maintenance and improvement of the LHC accelerators for Run 2 that follows a 2-year technical stop after the Boson Higgs discovery. The machine were prepared for running at almost double the energy of the LHC’s first run and they are gearing up for its second three-year run where it will not be possible to access to the underground tunnel of CERN. The goal for 2015 will be to run with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions, an energy never Achieved by any accelerator in the past and more than double of the precedent collisions.
CERN Control Centre is in full swing to carry out all the requested tests before circulating proton beams again in March 2015.
About CERN
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession. Serbia is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Union, JINR and UNESCO have Observer Status.
www.cern.ch
click the link to view the full set of images in the archive
