Moving mind portrait of
Mike Lamont

What fascinates you concerning your work and the LHC?

The Large Hardron Collider is a fascinating machine and immensly complicated. The fact that it works at all is because we managed to canton the expertise. So we have a cryogenics team, a vacuum team,  a power converter team, a radio frequency team, a beam instrumentation team. The machine has to work excellently in order to push the boundaries and to produce as many collissions as possible. The goal is to give the  experiments a big size of data outputs so that they can start answering questions like: is there any new physics at this new energy?

What do you do to stay motivated?

We are problem solving and curiosity driven almost on a daily basis. It is absorbing itself, you don‘t have to motivate yourself because every day is different. I work with incredible people. We are allowed to express ourselves, you can bring humanity and humor to the effort while keeping the ship in the right direction. And it is still a remarkable thing what we are doing. It is a huge priviledge to be part of it.

Which effect can your work have in society?

We bring togehter people from all over the world and try to solve common problems. We support other enterprises for example recently in the design, installation and building of a medical facility for cancer treatment. On the one hand people come here and are being educated but also we go out and use our expertise around the world in colloborations with other teams. In this sense I think it is a 21st century template of cooperation and pretty unique.

Could you give an advice to passionate people?

If you learn something, learn it properly, master the basics  and do the examples at the end of the chapter.

© Bree Corn, http://www.passionate-about.com

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