Comical Cosmiques

Viewed from Vallee Blanche, Cosmiques ridge and Aiguille du Midi is

very cute and peaceful. Tourists on the obsevatory of A. du Midi

(center) may not imagine of this, because they are standing on an

awful cliff.

Peaceful? Beauty (in this case mood) is in the eyes of the watcher! Maybe the gentle right hand side! I've always found it threatening, nervous with the "eperons" and "gendarmes" and overall a bit scary!

The sky is of course pretty real, but there is a bit too much blue and too little red.The Helbronner cable car which seems to fly in the sky is funny!

Ah, you know why it is colled Cosmiques, do you?

By the way this is how it looks twenty years later...Cheers,

i wonder how many people dont see the buildings in this photo

What does it mean Cosmiques? I up-loaded a photo for you, here.

Let's make a long story short, as this sits at the border of my hobbies and profession.

People have often gone up to mountains to look at the stars, since there is both less light pollution from the city lights and less atmosphere for the light to traverse, which makes eventually the stars twinkle and makes observations worse.

At the beginning of the XX century people realised that not only light comes from the skies, but also "cosmic rays" which are as well better seen in altitude, since are somehow absorbed by the atmosphere. Many discoveries of new particles were made studing cosmic rays, and a large activity took place in the French scientific community.

There was, on the pic du Midi, an observatory, and in the region of the col du Midi, to the left of this picture, Louis Leprince Ringuet (see for a biography in English) was among the driving forces of a laboratory for the study of cosmic rays.

This gave the names "Cosmiques" to the ridge, which is fully seen here, at whose end a pillar of a cablecar used to transport scientific material is still sitting (cropped in my picture, tell me if you want to see it)

Life was hard on the scientists, as you can imagine, but they discovered mysterious new heavy subatomic particles, to be later understood at particle accelerators. At a certain point the discovery potential of these studies and their instruments was exahusted, the lab dismantled, and part of the material ended up in the old "Cosmiques" hut.

Still the name of the activity "Cosmiques"=Cosmic stayed on forever in the mountains.

Hope you enyoyed the story!

It's an interesting story! I understand a lot of remains I saw at Col du Midi were glorious monuments, though they looked nothing but ugly. There are still others, a part of them?, you see in this photo. Now a days these study is going deep under the ground in Japan and a japanese scientist got a Nobel Prize two years ago, you remember. Thank you for giving me a good imagination.

I met Masatoshi Koshiba-san twice. He is a great man. He had a vision and make it true, and it is rightly a glory for your country. You see, people once went up the mountains to see the cosmic rays before they got diluted in the sky. Nowadays people go below the mountains (Kamioka, Frejus, Gran Sasso, Soudan, Sudbury...) to hope as much cosmic rays as possible are absorbed not only by the atmosphere but by the rock, so that at the end only very special ones survive, the famous neutrinos... If you like this stuff, I can try to find out one or two interesting books.

 

By the way the pillars in that photo should be part of the cablecar used to bring material to the old cosmique hut...