It’s being tired, because you’ve been cramming information about jets, electrons, muons, photons, and all manner of other things yet unidentified in your head. It’s the swelling in your eyes because you’ve been staring at code, a sheriff and an outlaw locking eyes on a dusty main street, each knowing that only one of you will make it through this alive. It’s the flutter in your heart when they declare stable beams, as if this time when the event display lights up with a new collision it will be in time, a real collision, filled with jets and muons and everything that makes a detector glow like it’s Christmas. It’s the joy of thinking you know no one in the experiment and finding out that you seem to know everyone, and they remember you. It’s too much wine with dinner, it’s too little water when you travel, it’s too small a bathroom in your hostel. It’s Guinness in an Irish pub in France and a local power-trio belting out acoustic versions of Alice in Chains. It’s French and German and Russian and Chinese and UK English and American English and everything in-between, all coming at you in maelstrom of expression and emotion. It’s having those first insights into simple things that may lead to a dead end, or something wonderful.
It’s science.
