STEEM at the CERN LHC - the final last words… from the organizer

With STEEM, frontiers can be pushed further. Many say that on the platform. @steemstem is not an exception.

We however wanted to demonstrate the statement and do something crazy: organizing the first steemSTEM meetup at 100 meters underground, directly inside the LHC.

And we did it!

_{[image credits: @dber]}

What one sees on the above picture is indeed the CMS detector, open for maintenance, with the LHC in the middle. This grey pipe is indeed nothing but the largest accelerator ever built by humans (it is long of 27 kilometers) and the colorful object plenty of cables around it is CMS, one of the detector monitoring the high-energy particle collisions going on at the Large Hadron Collider. This picture has been taken by one of us. This happened for real (even after accounting for some Mandela effects).

22 Steemians managed to get to CERN, stand near the CMS beast and take as many pictures and videos as they wanted. They were coming from Columbia, USA, Canada, and a bunch of European countries. @steemstem is indeed very international! For some of them, it was a long trip to get there, and I recommend reading about their adventure by clicking on the different links provided at the end of this post. These posts are all worthy!

I will of course not give my impressions about the tour (this is my fifth times underground, inside the LHC). This, I leave it to the others… I will instead bring the other face of the coin, the one of the organizer (i.e. me).

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BRINGING STEEM TO CERN - PIECE OF CAKE (OR NOT)

Although on the official CERN visit webpage, it is explicitly written that tours do not include any underground visit, we were there, thanks to the magic of e-mails and phone calls.

Okay, this was maybe slightly more complicated than a couple of e-mails and phone calls… But in short, this proves that @steemstem can definitely push the frontiers further. (By the way, is this a real proof?)

For those who know me a little bit (from the chat), the current period is actively stressing in terms of professional deadlines (note: the grant proposal has been submitted yesterday afternoon).

I nevertheless decided to create dedicated lecture material for the meetup which is still not fully posted, as can be observed from my blog. This will be fixed in the next few weeks (I have barely no time at the moment).

Putting more stress on me is better, isn’t it? :)

To make the story funnier, my slides were completed at 9:30AM on Friday the 9^th of February, and the CERN tour was starting at 10:00 AM on the same day. Better late than never!

On top of that, the weather decided to challenge my venue. Paris (where I work) was indeed under the snow on Thursday. In other words, Paris was pari-lyzed. However, I managed!

And very importantly, organizing the food stuff was tough. How to find a restaurant not already fully booked, accepting a group of 20 and easily reachable as the amount of available cars was limited? This was easy… a couple of phone calls and e-mails, as usual!

Food-wise, this workshop was great! I hope none of the participants will contradict me here… The two restaurants I picked were great picks!

Wait a minute… did I just say 20? We were supposed to be 20, but we were actually 22. A couple of e-mails later (and no phone call this time), 22 people were granted access to CMS, instead of 20 :p

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MY FEEDBACK

The meetup organization was kind of easy, but demanded me a lot, once put into the context. Believe it or not… I however think that this was fully worthy, and I would be more than happy to organize a V2 in some time.

The tour was nice, and I think everyone enjoyed my one-day-long one-man-show. On my side, I have definitely enjoyed constantly speaking about physics during an entire day.

I must confess that I was a little bit surprized by many questions that have been asked during the day. Although I am not afraid of anything about particle physics in general, the more experimental side of the field is more complicated to me, and machine-related questions are sometimes a nightmare. I used the ‘I don’t know’ answer more than once :)

I by the way thank a lot all the people who helped in one way or the other, and in particular the drivers (@dber, @justtryme90, @aurel.proorocu, @tristan-muller and @alexs1320) and @suesa for the badges.

In addition, I would also like to thank @freyablekman, our CMS guide who just joined Steemit yesterday (I was a bit slow in creating her account).

Our tour had the chance to include a very nice presentation of the CMS detector thanks to her! Remember that I am a theorist, thus not expert in detectors, and my job with this respect would have been… at least not as great ^^

As a counter-effect of being the one talking most of the time, I didn’t have the occasion to discuss calmly with each of the 21 other participants. For the next meetup, we should definitely include in the agenda more time to discuss with each other! Lesson learned!

I am now trying to enjoy relaxing a little bit… Actually, I will do that on Sunday, when flying to the US, once also all my urgent duties will be cleared ;)

And I will soon restart writhing about physics… please do not worry!

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IN THE MEANTIME, ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

With most of the steemstem crew at the workshop, @mobbs became the general in charge, with the help of most our curators of course (and in particular @kryzsec, @ruth-girl, @trumpman and @zest). The result was amazing:

The exponential growth of our community continues. More Steemians are continuously joining us on the chat, we reward more and more unique authors, more and more different posts, etc.

That is amazing to see! [This also means a lot of work for the crew, please bare that in mind before complaining about a post we apparently forgot to vote :p]

I do not know if the meetup at CERN contributed to our growth, but I like to think it did. We have after all brought STEEM in the mecca of physics ^^

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

Please check the write-ups of @alexs1320, @bendelgreco, @dber, @frederikaa, @galotta and one some math stuff that has been discussed, @justtryme90, @kerriknox and her chocolates, @lesmouths-travel, @scienceangel, our two @steem-hikers, @suesa and @suesa-random.

I hope I didn’t miss any… Otherwise please let me know :)

And the final final words: thanks to everyone for your participation! This was a great event and I repeat: I am your man for organizing a next one at some point!