February 23, 2025 - Geneva
I was pleased to find myself replenished when my alarm went off at 8 am. I'd managed to sleep through the night; given how exhausted I was going to bed maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise. My watch says I did 28k steps yesterday and I could feel that when I stood up. oof
Having successfully roused at a reasonable time, I decided to pull the trigger on my harebrained plan to visit the CERN facility today. There's a tram that runs directly from my apartment to the CERN campus in Meyrin/Geneva. It turns out that there's a bakery a block away from the apartment and very close to the tram stop, I suppose that'll become my morning staple. I was only able to take my pain au chocolat to-go today but I had time to drink my café before the tram arrived.
Enjoying my coffee for 5 minutes before walking the extra minute to the tram station.
Showing up to CERN (Council European of Research Nuclear) at 9AM is a great way to ensure you can visit. Upon entry, there were only a few other people in the lobby; and it turns out Sundays are days dedicated for families and individual visitors. The place is free for the museum parts but you must be onsite to reserve a guided tour if you want to see the equipment and control rooms. Despite the lobby looking empty, the 9:30 tour had already been completely booked; I was pleased when I managed to book an 11:30 tour.
I walked into the auditorium with 5 minutes till the opening of the next tour for reservations; I had to stick around a little extra after the movie finished to catch up on what I'd missed as a result of refreshing my browser like a madman initially.
Chosen for its centralness in Europe and international culture, the sleepy Meyrin area of Geneva was chosen as the build site for CERN's experiments. Today, it's still surrounded by a fair amount of farmland.
I also booked a 10:30 lab session, but this is much more oriented towards families with small children: you do experiments with ping pong balls and marbles to determine which channels are blocked in an enclosed box. Even if it was oriented towards children, I let my inner child take hold (and the grade school level French instructions were welcome 😂) and I had a good time.
Lab activities included: rolling ping pong balls and marbles through the foam chamber to identify where the hole was and using an IR camera to temperature differences. All in all, I'd say they were good experiments for young, impressionable scientists driving home the points of experimenting and keeping an open mind.
Between the lab session and the tour, I managed to sneak a bit of time with the exhibits regarding the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). I found these exhibits fascinating with a lot of good information, relevant models/illustrations, and fun interactive items. There was even a volunteer set aside to talk about a miniature linear particle accelerator.
Two of the exhibits covered the LHC broken up into accelerating particles up to incomprehensible speeds and the detector machines that make use of the collisions.
Here's a mini particle accelerator, it can shoot really cool lasers up to a foot long! Most of the doodads along the barrel are for pulling vacuum.
Apparently this little squiggle pattern helps center the accelerated protons into a very narrow beam as they exit the accelerator. Kinda like rifling in a barrel.
Oh, Large Hadron Collider refers to the size of the collider, not the hadrons (particles made of quarks, like protons & neutrons). With large already setting the bar, I'm dissappointed to hear that the newly approved collider will be called the "Future Circular Collider" and not the "Humongous" or "Big Ass" collider; still, I'm sure there'll be jokes to be made about future names once that one becomes the Present.
The tour was great; our guide was a research employee (I suppose her contract must dictate a certain number of hours working as a guide) for the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) lab and she was able to bring us inside the campus to see two systems: the decommissioned SyncroCyclotron and the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus - that seems like a stretch of an acronym, Wikipedia 🙄) particle detector.
You know, I'm something of a scientist myself...
CERN's first lab machine, the synchro-cyclotron. It started up 3 years after the CERN picked Meryin as the location; a very impressive timetable. By alternating magnet polarity in its round center, physicists were able to accelerate particles to ~30% of light speed before they collided with the unit's housing / target.
We went from seeing the first machine to one of the newest machines: the ATLAS detector. Data from the ATLAS and CMS detectors were critical in detecting the Higgs Boson in 2012.
A replica of one of the magnets used in the detector for centering the beam, this machine is huuuge.
At the press of a button, the guide was able to reveal the control room on the other side of the visiting room. Turns out, the LHC doesn't operate during the winter to avoid straining the electric grid and to have downtime for maintenance/upgrades. So while I didn't get to see science happening live, the guide pointed out that winter is the only season visitors have the chance to see the underground caverns. I'll be sure to reach out to the CMS experiment about a visit.
The LHC operates 24/7 in the hopes of contacting millions of hadrons and observing the results; it's kinda crazy that the Higgs Boson has been observed 16 million times since the first one found in 2012
What struck me during the course of the day is that in the auditorium overview film, CERN was founded in the wake of WWII as Europe's answer to all of the particle physicists going to the US. And to my eyes, it worked! It's a warming sense of hope that an institution dedicated to science continues strong and has yielded amazing discoveries. For sure, the US has no appetite to construct a rivaling piece of equipment; the closest thing I think the US has is NASA, and who knows for how much longer.
So they found the Higgs Boson but can you spot Dis Bozo?
CERN was also the birthplace of the world wide web, evolving from protocols developed to exchange data between the detectors and computing centers around the world. I like how restrained the title is.
An illustration of how the detector works. Different layers of instruments are able to measure the energy and trajectory of different particles: electrons, photons, protons, and muons. Supposedly, getting the full energy balance will allow the scientists to deduce if they've detected dark matter if they don't observe anything but energy is detected.
A model of the detector.
This may have been the coolest part for me from an engineering perspective: the LHC has a better vacuum than space. This is accomplished by beefy vacuum pumps and cooling the tube with liquid helium at 2 degrees K. Oh, and it's like super long too with expensive, fancy magnets. .
The third exhibit was about how the LHC is aiming to reproduce the conditions present just at or after the Big Bang. It was interesting to draw the overlap of particle physics with space and exploration, but I suppose the breakthroughs at CERN have been just as impactful as the new tech developed by NASA.
Another takeaway was the evolution of the systems. It shows the loop of using tech to push boundaries, then having the next generation of technology come in to push them further yet again. The synchrocyclotron was what drove that home to me.
I basically spent the whole day at CERN, 9 - 5. I snagged the tram home and spent the evening taking care of administrative stuff I was too tired yesterday to do: conduct an inventory of the apartment, buy some apartment supplies, catch up on emails, make a few calls, and my suitcase finally was delivered around 21:30 (yay!).
Spotted a skating rink on the route home, maybe I'll have to give it a shot some weeknight.
Opened my mailbox for the first time; it's a very different style than what I'm used to seeing in the US but its very funcitonal.
Nothing too fancy for dinner: I was too tired to eat out but was too late to buy supplies except from a tobacco/convenience store a few blocks away. Hence: day old bread and a jar of pickled veg haha.
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