Daniel Wollmann

Daniel Wollmann

daniel


Only a few people have tasted the atmosphere of the CERN control center, or called control room in short. Daniel, an applied physicist who has been working at CERN for eleven years, knows it well. He has spent several nights shifts there, where “besides the experiment you are doing, you get to know the people who are with you well”, he ensures.

That may be the best of this assignment: all that work done and the close collaboration with the CERNies around you in that busy and intense space, which at night turns into a calm and grateful place.

Before becoming a CERNie in 2009, Daniel studied electrical engineering at the Dresden University of Technology (Germany), got into contact with accelerators at a very small accelerator in Singapore and ended up doing his PhD in physics at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). Later on, he jumped to CERN, where he got a postdoc fellowship in LHC Collimation.

Now, he works in Machine Protection. His mission? To ensure that the LHC does not destroy itself. In other words, understand failure cases, protect the accelerator equipment against beam impact and keep the superconducting magnet circuits safe.

Even the life of a large accelerator is brittle. As the verses of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and poet, say, “Don’t let yourselves be deceived! / Life is precious little. / Gulp it in eager greed!”. To Daniel, because life in itself is too short, it will never fulfil us. Life can be fading very quickly.

This is related to a German proverb that he knows, and that comes out of the Bible, which is true for many German proverbs. It says: Der Mensch denkt Goot lenkt (Human beings plan their lives, but God is in charge). To Daniel, we should do our best, e.g. when planning for the future, but there are a lot of things that we do not control. This releases the pressure to be in charge of everything.

Daniel’s dreams lean on two hands. On one of them, to help young scientists to find a purpose, to develop themselves, and to reach their full potential in science. On the other one, as a physicist, he drives to discover what our world is made of, describe it, and open new doors to make the world better.

This is what Daniel’s heart is burning for: helping others and making the world a better place, pieces of dreams that come together. It does not need a revolutionary discovery, but little steps can change the world. And, in fact, it has already begun with Daniel’s actions and plans.

At CERN, what is important for him is to keep focused, and that means that CERNies, as a team, unite behind the common vision, pulling in the same direction. Something that sometimes involves spending hours and hours in a control room.

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