Colliding ideas over lunch

It’s a typical, cloudy February morning on CERN’s Meyrin site. After hours spent hunched over your computer, a quick glance at the clock tells you it’s 12 p.m. – almost time for lunch. You frown as you imagine the chaotic, heaving crowds in R1, the long lines and the hunt for a free seat. You decide to spare yourself the trouble and stay at your desk.

But, is that the most exciting, relaxing or productive way to spend your lunch break? Wouldn’t it be better if you could meet new friends and potentially build new projects instead?

Enter LunchCollider, a project that you register for in the morning and then an algorithm selects a random person with whom you meet for lunch. This social project has been built for the CERN community and is designed to encourage us to create friendships, build on ideas and share knowledge.

“We would be extremely happy if new CERN projects or new physics theories came to life thanks to LunchCollider,” says Mietek Dabrowski, one of the founders of LunchCollider.  

“Recently I had lunch with a person I’ve never met before. I had no idea who this person was, no idea where they came from, and no idea what they did at CERN,” says one participant after their first experience of using LunchCollider. “But one hour and fifteen minutes passed very quickly. The list of topics we wanted to talk about, from our home countries to how we ended up at CERN, was long! Now we have to go back to work. That was an amazing experience; I’ll do it again. Hopefully at 12 p.m. on Wednesday next week.”

The lunch sessions are organised twice a week – either on Tuesdays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Fridays. Between 8.30 and 11.30 a.m., you register for a lunch session on the website, where you also choose to meet with either one or two people. At 11.45 a.m., you receive an e-mail with the names of your lunch buddies and instructions on where to meet them. The time and place are fixed – 12 noon in Restaurant 1.

LunchCollider was launched in October last year and already has 150 subscribers. Its creators are Mietek Dabrowski, Piotr Nikiel, Roberto Campesato and Esther Zanon. “We were bound together by a common vision,” explains Piotr. “What if, in such a diverse and heterogeneous place like CERN, everyone could seamlessly exchange knowledge, ideas and interests with everybody else?”

The creators’ hope to build not only friendships but also professional networks – places to seek and receive information.

“We understand that meeting strangers might be a bit frightening, but we want to fight that fear. Some people have admitted that they are slightly nervous before the meeting – they worry that the conversation won’t flow smoothly. This never turns out to be the case and, in the end, everybody enjoys it,” says Roberto.

The concept of meeting kind, smiling, albeit slightly nervous, new people over lunch is certainly refreshing. Besides physics, engineering and programming, the number of topics you can talk about is limitless – culture, arts, sports, politics, and anything else you might think of.

Try it for yourself: all you have to do is to register at LunchCollider.ch.