Finally snow! Snow is not a really frequent thing in Hamburg. We have a very maritime climate here, so winters are usually gray and rainy. But this morning when I got up and looked out of the window, everything was white. Beautiful. So and here you see the real cold ILC.
As you might know, the technology for the International Linear Collider is based on superconducting accelerating cavities. Superconductivitiy is a nice feature of nature which appears in certain materials, like the metal Niob out of which the accelerating structures, the heart of the ILC, are made. If Niob is cooled down to real deep temperatures, like -270 degrees Centigrade (what's that in Fahrenheit?), its electrical resistance vanishes. This allows the almost loss-less storage of electromagnetic energy in the Niob structures which helps a lot in accelerating the particles. To get down to such cold temperatures of course snow is not sufficient for cooling. To get down to -270 degrees one has to use liquid Helium.
Ok, that's the physics lesson for today. Unfortunately the snow already melts away outside. So I guess we are back to the gray and rainy defaults.
I had a really relaxing last weekend until on Saturday evening my phone rang and I found myself talking to the husband of Petra Folkerts, the head of the PR office at DESY. Unfortunately Petra got ill and completely lost her voice (that’s why she asked her husband to phone me). Petra was supposed to go to the meeting of the ILC Communicators which took place at CERN on Tuesday and Wednesday. And now she asked whether I could go on her behalf. I was a little bit reluctant because my schedule for this week was quite full. But well, I guess you already know that I really devote myself to the ILC, so I managed to get rid of most of my appointments for the Tuesday and decided to go to CERN for just one day.
So on Tuesday morning I boarded a plane to Frankfurt where I caught a connection flight to Geneva (Hello Lufthansa! Could you PLEASE re-install the direct flights from Hamburg to Geneva? It would really improve research in Europe!!!). So I finally showed up at CERN at around 11:00 to join the ILC Communicators. The Communicators are a group of people devoted to foster and improve communication inside and outside the ILC project. So I was sitting around the table with the heads of the PR offices of Fermilab, SLAC, CERN and some other colleagues especially interested in communication issues. We had a very successful and active meeting, discussing a huge agenda of things related to what has to be done next in the PR and communication business. Central point of our discussions was the implementation of the Global ILC Communication Plan. So we debated vividly about the design of web pages and newsletters, how to get communication on the agenda of the next important conferences, and of course the most pressing topic (at least for the view of most of my colleagues): the design of a common ILC logo.
So we had quite a few examples of logos on the table and liked none of them. The comments were in the range from:'This looks like a logo of a big international logistic company' (which is probably not a too bad description of what the ILC is right now…), to 'Oh, this looks like a set of colliding sex toys'. This comment, by the way, was made by a very distinguished British professor… So the conclusion of this session was, that we should go back to the drawing boards. But we have a quite good idea now about how to proceed.
So after a full day of intense working I flew home, this time via Munich (again, please Lufthansa, do it!) and 17.5 hours after I left my home that morning I was back home.
Ok, last week I hope I made a clear point in why it is interesting to devote your life to the ILC. A lot of people have the same view as me, so we are a quite large and growing international community trying to get together the design of this future machine. This is a wonderful fact and we really enjoy the pioneering spirit. And in our pioneering effort we create a lot of meetings to discuss our work. And as this is a truly international effort, of course these meetings are scattered all around the world. If I wanted to attend all of those (and they really deserve it), then I better spend the rest of this year on planes.
Fortunately physicsists have the gift of self-organsiation. It tends to start chaotic, but it comes to order eventually. So finally people recognised that there must be a life outside an aeroplane. And this was a wonderful example where big important lab directors (worried about the travel budgets) and younger researchers (worried about their families) had the same intentions (though different motivations) to limit the inflation of meetings.
An interesting idea under discussion right now is, to define 3 to 4 meeting slots for the ILC community per year rotating around the bigger labs on the world. So whoever wants to organise a meeting knows where and when the next slot is available. The host institute then just offers meeting rooms (and of course coffee!!) and nothing more. The organisation of the meetings and workshops taking place stays in the hands of the people interested in that meeting. And as the meetings then bunch up at one place, there is an excellent chance to have synergy effects between the different groups meeting at that place.
Other interesting concepts of avoiding travel are of course are of course to replace real meeting with virtual meetings, like phone or video conferences. These kinds of meetings could be very effective, but they reach their limits sometimes. Try to organise a phone meeting with Europeans (GMT+0/1), Westcoast-Americans (GMT-8) and Japanese (GMT+8) and you know what I mean….
Finally snow! Snow is not a really frequent thing in Hamburg. We have a very maritime climate here, so winters are usually gray and rainy. But this morning when I got up and looked out of the window, everything was white. Beautiful. So and here you see the real cold ILC. 
