Day 11 – Geneva

Today is a visit to CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). I’ve reserved a 9:30 am booking to the CERN Science Gateway. What is CERN? CERN’s work is to help uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. They do this by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers, to advance the boundaries of human knowledge (home.cern).

One of the particle accelerators, The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft)! Wikipedia does a good job of describing The LHC.

They don’t allow visitors in the tunnels, but I was able to get a tour of the Synchrocyclotron and ATLAS control room. The Synchrocyclotron was built in 1957 (featured picture above) and was CERN’s first accelerator. The ATLAS control room is responsible for keeping the ATLAS detector healthy and running.

In addition to the tours, there are numerous interactive exhibits that cover all aspects of particle physics. Definitely the place to get your nerd-on! 🤓

The interactive displays really entice you to uh, interact with them! 😀

And it’s all for free!

I’m not sure I understand it all, but I came away with more than I knew before I arrived.

CERN Visitors Center.
Free electronic lockers for storing your stuff while you visit.
Sculpture outside the Visitors Center.
This is the type of electrical feeds needed to power the accelerators. Sometimes they have to shut them down when electricity prices spike.
This is a video about the Synchrocyclotron I found on YouTube that was the same presentation as in our tour. You walk into a dark room where the Synchrocyclotron is located and then they superimpose graphics on the actual Synchrocyclotron. It’s an interesting effect because it looks like the Synchrocyclotron is being constructed right in front of you.
Atlas Control Center. Kind of hard to see because of the smoked glass.
The woman responsible for data quality, walking past the data status screens.
A Lego model of the Atlas detector.
A 1-meter linear (not circular) particle accelerator. This is a low energy accelerator used for analyzing things like museum artwork for authenticity.
One of the most interesting things at CERN – the first World Wide Web server! The World Wide Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s!

This invention makes this content possible today!

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