On these hot days of August one is led to remember the lyrics of Elton John's 1972 hit "Rocket Man": "and all that science I don't understand... It's just my job five days a week". Indeed, being a scientist should not be considered a mission, something you work at 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We do have our lives and attend to them... more or less.

The thing is, I do subscribe to the above concept, but I cannot help being surprised today, as I walk in a deserted Building 40 at CERN, at noon on a random Saturday. Okay, it is a weekend, and okay, it is August, but this is CERN, and building 40 is the center of analysis activities of the two big experiments leading humanity into the unknown, ATLAS and CMS. How is it possible that only weeks after the start of Run 2 there are only empty corridors and offices here ? Where are all my colleagues, whom I until last week figured unbelievably busy producing groundbreaking new results ? People, I have an overview talk at a conference in three weeks - what am I supposed to present if there are no new approved results ???


The cafeteria at building 40 at 1PM on August 8th 2015. No human being in sight.

Okay, rant mode off. The above was actually a joke rather than a rant, as I know for a fact that the CMS experiment will have several extremely interesting new results to show at the upcoming conferences, based on the new 13 TeV data collected since last June. Still, the silence today in building 40 is eerie. Add to this the fact that I, for one, am diligently at work (in fact this blog is written in my lunch break), and you easily understand how it is hard to resist the temptation of mentioning that facts indeed show that scientists are normal people.



From above one also notices how nobody is sitting in the open spaces... Oh wait, okay there's one guy there.