Lucerne, CMS, and Wilson

So, things are going well. I've been taking an outrageous number of pictures recently. This will not be short.

Someone went fishing near the Bel-Air stop this morning.

And then lets just get this out of the way:

Lucerne

Once again, Cadin, Gwen, and I got on a train.

This time we were going to Lucerne, right in the middle of Switzerland.

It's a 3.5 hour train ride from Geneva to Lucerne, where we met Ben. I'm sure you remember Ben.

Ben has been working at a hostel in Ticino -- the canton right next to Italy.

On Saturday, we rented a paddle boat and hung out in the middle of Lake Lucerne.

It's a good lake.

Then we walked around and saw the sights.

By chance, there was a music festival going on. The name of it was Blue Balls music festival, which is not the name I would have chosen.

Somehow we picked up an orange happy meal balloon that made it almost all the way through the day.

It acquired a face, and the name Wilson.

We also called it Alex, because I'm never in the pictures.

And then we met Nathalie, who is Swiss and works in Lucerne as an artist. She gave Wilson another face.

It was supposed to rain on Sunday, but that wasn't going to stop us. We learned how to say "bring me to the ponchos" in German, nehmen sie mich zu den regenponchos, and went to the nearest Migros to prepare.

German, and especially Swiss German, is crazy. They just add together words all willy nilly and somehow it's grammatically correct.

Mount Pilatus

is the mountain we climbed on Sunday. Because we bought the regenponchos, it turned out to be a beautiful, hot day.

We convinced some Swissies we met the day before to come along for the hike.

Lukas and Micha are also artists who live in Lucerne. Unfortunately, Lukas got sick and had to hike back down. Micha, however, felt good and would 'continue carrying the Swiss flag,' as he put it.

It was so humid in the beginning. We were drenched.

But it gets cooler when you go up.

And gradually we moved into some clouds.

We played a game where you try to hide the onion in someone's backpack without them knowing. Micha ended up with the onion, but I think he was too nice to say anything, or maybe he wanted it for dinner, because he had it for a long time and eventually we parted ways and he still had it.

My goal for this hike was to pet a cow.

For a while it seemed like it wasn't going to happen, but then we went around a corner and could hear the bells.

And then there they were.

I crossed the train tracks, cut my elbow, and got shocked twice by an electric fence for this picture ⇩.

Worth it though.

According to Lucerne legend, a dragon with healing powers lives in the cliffs of this mountain.

People would bring the sick and wounded up the mountain in hopes that the dragon would heal them.

But now most people just take the cog wheel train up to see the dragon.

Apparently it's the steepest train in the world.

Against all odds, we made it. Here's us at the top:

And here's a view of the mountain from far away:

For time (and definitely not because we were tired) we took the train down the mountain.

What a good hike.

CMS

I went to see CMS again because it's awesome.

The LHC is probably the most complicated thing ever made by humans. Look how massive and intricate just this one detector is. It might as well be the death star.

And the crazy thing is, directly above it looks like this:

Going down to visit the detectors wouldn't be possible if the accelerator was running. I've gotten to see so much more than I would have if it weren't LS2 (Long Shutdown 2).

Everything is getting upgraded for high luminosity runs in the mid 2020s. For example, they're removing every single CSC (cathode strip chamber) of CMS to install updated electronics in them.

The purpose of the CSCs is to track muons that are produced from collisions and decays. You can see them removed here:

I've finally gotten my E-field Fourier Decomposition to work. These are supposed to look the same.

It's not perfect, but progress!

I can't believe there are only 4 weeks left before I leave.