A CMS event display. Image courtesy of Symmetry Breaking.

Any Very Important Person who wanders through one of the Large Hadron Collider’s control rooms or worldwide remote operations centers is bound to be impressed. The equipment is state-of-the-art. There is a near-constant buzz of activity now that the LHC has started up again. And large monitors display very impressive, technical-looking visualizations of potential events as they are detected.

Unlike Monty Python’s machine that goes bing, however, these displays are rife with meaning. You just need a secret decoder blog post!

That’s what the Symmetry Breaking team has set out to do in a recent series of blog posts. The posts are particularly timely, given CERN's recent announcement of the first attempt at 7 TeV collisions on 30 March. Check them out, and you too can smile knowingly when you see an event display!

A CMS display

An ATLAS display

An LHC display