(Sometimes you just like how a story you wrote for a newspaper turns out. Like this one. With all the hype and hullaballoo about the new machine at CERN and figuring out how the universe was created, people seem to have forgotten the human aspect, the gentle joys and laughter that went into the process. These are some of my memories of a time when life was simpler and softer...)
Arriving in a suburb of Geneva on Mayday was a kind of foretaste of what was to come for us in the time that we lived in the city. Everything was closed as tight as only the Swiss could do it, except for a tiny branch of a chain department store, where we found a couple of cans of petit pois and the last crusty loaf of bread that we grabbed from under the outstretched hand of a browsing housewife. We had just landed in the city – in the country, in fact – that was to be home to us for a while on a total holiday and had no idea what to find where and how, but we went about looking for it anyway, undaunted. Father was doing a stint at CERN, working on the cross-border SPS (the Super Proton Synchrotron) – the hot haute machine at the time – and we soon learned what life as a CERN family was all about.
Enmeshed in a gently strict but intense Baccalaureate programme at the local international school, I had little time to absorb or even understand that ethos of belonging to the scientific community, but various terms soon entered my vocabulary. SPS, of course, was one, the ring-shaped facility where Father did experiments studying the quark-gluon plasma and various other nuclear physics delights. The instant high level of respect we got in contrast to the way gastarbeiters or immigrants were treated was another. What was more fascinating to watch from a youngster’s perspective was the family’s varied biorhythms. Father was often asleep when I left for school or had gone out to work long before dawn cracked, since the tests were done around the clock and the team worked on a shift system. He told us stories of the people he worked with, like the Portuguese who admired a pretty girl’s behind with typical physicist jargon: “What an oscillator!”
Every now and then he had a full day off and we would all go grocery shopping. Meat in France was far better than that available in Switzerland; there was also Evian to be bought in carton-loads, since the water in Geneva ran right off the Saleve, limestone and all, and was hideous to drink, and then there were the wonderful potato chips that only the vast store just across the border had… Going through customs was a cinch for us. The car had a small round sticker on it that identified it was belonging to a CERN-ite and we waved and smiled as the bar lifted and allowed us to coast through from one country to the other. Perhaps the only time that the customs stopped us was when we were smuggling meat on one of our trips – it was rationed then, to half a kilo per adult, and we had about three kilos in the boot. But no, no danger, they waved us through after admiring Mum’s sari. The sticker was essential for Father, since he worked in France but lived in Switzerland and had to navigate the Duane many times a day in a long tunnel that was a special entrance to the research centre. It was almost Bond-ish, or even something out of Le Carre, with hidden eyes watching every move and monitoring each trip.
The SPS, which now feeds the brand new LHC (Large Hadron Collider) for the just-started experiment to recreate the Big Bang, was also where I did the main experiment for my biology lab for the Bacc. A few select mung beans were put into the ring and subjected to high-level magnetism, after which the beleagured seeds were coaxed to grow – which they did, dutifully pointing in the direction I had said they would when influenced neo-germinally by magnetic forces. I got a decent grade for it, too. And as he took me for a little permitted tour into the facility so I could see just where my seeds would be placed, Father explained how the new and hugely larger ring would be built, deep under the place we called home a long time ago.
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