ATLAS Walkway and Observation Room

The major “inaccuracy” in Time Crystal, that is, the major things which are describe which do not actually exist, are

• the covered Walkway from the Globe to the ATLAS Control Building
• the ATLAS Observation Room

Both of these items were in the original plans for the ATLAS buildings. In the story Wyken Seagrave imagines that by 2012 both of them will have been constructed, but at the time of writing the story (2007) neither exist.

A minor “inaccuracy” is that the Mercator software does not exist. This is described in the SciSoftA entry in this blog.

 

SciSoftA

In the novel Time Crystal SciSoftA is Alex Karolyi’s Hungarian software company. It’s web site is www.scisofta.com. It was this company that wrote Mercator, the software that allows ATLAS scientists (and visitors) to retrieve event data and create images on the screen.

In reality there are several pieces of software in ATLAS that do a similar job.

Details of Persint can be found at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/PersintWiki
Information on Atlantis is at http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/atlantis/

Wyken Seagrave imagines Mercator as a combination of these two pieces of software. The view they characters get in Volume 1 in the ATLAS Observation Room is supposed to be like Persint while the view in USA15 is like Atlantis.

 

ATLAS

ATLAS is one of the main particle detectors in CERN. The image above shows the webcam. It is pointing at the end of the detector where the disaster happened on Crystal Day in 2012. Depending on which way it is pointing you might see the big wheel fixed to the end of ATLAS and the beam pipe shield.

Click here to go to the main public ATLAS web site in Geneva.

Click here for the scientists’ main ATLAS page.

Earlier versions of this story (which you can read on this web site) went into more detail about ATLAS and how the engineers control it. You can find a lot of the technical details on the ATLAS Twiki.