Going through my online dictionaries from German to English to French, it seems that the word "mondän", "mondain" and "mundane" has a slightly different meaning in each language. What I wanted to say, is that the ATLAS Overview Week Dinner took place this evening in the “Senat” in Paris, which is very… mundane? and it is always funny to see the 300 physicists dressing nearly as casual as always in a place like this.
The Senat is beautiful, and contrary to social dinners, this time foot was not served seated, but on several buffets with oysters and all kind of “petits fours”. Some complained about not having eaten enough, but were consoled by an abundance of champagne. I appreciated this setting as it allowed to circle around and have a chat with many different people. Actually there were many different physicists I knew from all kind of occasions – Atlas is a big collaboration of about 1800 physicists participating so far, therefore it is pretty natural to know a bunch of them.
The discussions we had were very interesting to me – naturally I was asked “So, when will you join Atlas?” I don’t know exactly. The presentations I’ve seen during the day, reminded me a lot about the presentations I’ve seen at D0, my current experiment, 7 years ago: status reports about installation, delays and problems, and how to handle them etc. All the issues of an experiment coming together. And Atlas is definitely coming together now: the excitement starts to get noticeable that in a perceivable future data taking will start for real.
Yet, I worked in D0 for the last seven years in getting some of the things done for "good" data to be taken, but I haven’t used this data yet to derive any physics results from it, and that is actually the aim of an experiment. I was surprised how understanding the physicists from Atlas were, when I told them about my dilemma between doing a physics analysis in D0 and joining Atlas for the start up and funnily enough I had the feeling to be encouraged to look at the data in D0 first. Isn’t that nice?
PS: I even spoke with Peter Jenni, the spokesperson of Atlas, who told me “I know you, you are famous, I read something from your Quantum Diaries.” Isn’t that funny?
Peter Jennings is the recently-deceased American newsman - I think you meant Peter Jenni ;)
Posted by: Peter | October 06, 2005 at 11:03 AM
indeed! and I corrected it in the text - I must have been a little too much in tasting everything on the buffet! Or actually I suspect rather a bad brain wiring as much as Gordon: http://qd.typepad.com/4/2005/10/its_amber_stupi.html - It's not the first time I made this mistake!
Posted by: ursula | October 07, 2005 at 03:05 AM