15 - Of Horseshoes & Hand Grenades: Scale and Precision - Geneve & Cessy

Saturday, March 08

Having been tired for the past week, it felt great to sleep in.  Despite having had a hard time falling asleep, I feel much more refreshed.  I even managed to make use of my living room as a part of the morning: I sipped a cup of coffee while perusing some of the info pamphlets I've accumulated.  Afterwards, I went out to the market, having previously learned my lesson about grocery store hours I didn't want to miss the opportunity to buy some fresher produce and local produits du terroir.    

At the market, a lot of people were buying flowers; there was even a woman asking me to help her buy flowers for her mother. Is it being a man that I don't understand why so many flower sales or a cultural difference?  I picked up some groceries: charcuterie, cheese, and produce.  We're seeing some spring harvest crops coming out now, like les asperges ou des fraises 🍓.  I snapped up a barquette of gariguette strawberries, I'm fairly sure they were grown in the warmer areas of France but maybe they grown in Suisse too.  I also took home a bundle of white asparagus spears which were proudly labeled as Italian grown.  

One of the pamphlets listed this place as a good, family-owned shop to patronize but given the line out the door, I opted for a market stall instead.

With elections coming up, there was a lot of hustle & bustle around these tents.

I didn't buy any wild dandelion but I found the name interesting: dent du lion translates literally as lion's tooth.  Perhaps the knowledge of it being clean/naturally taken care is worth a lot, cause I wouldn't have thought to charge 4CHF per kilo for a weed 😂 Actually, that reminds me: I think dandelion is a type of aster that was brought to the US from Europe and was once a desirable flower to propagate.  Ah, such naievete.  

Mes achats complets, I dropped the goods at the apartment and quickly caught the tram headed to CERN.  From there, I hailed an Uber to drive me through the French paysage to the sleepy town of Cessy.  My driver was from Liberia and started up conversation towards the end of the drive, pointing out how pretty the narrow roads and countryside were.  He said most Liberians are fairly culturally aligned with the US, perhaps a remnant of our catastrophic colonization effort.  Thinking about it, I remember Liberia mentioned in my US history textbook as a failed "repatriation" plan for slaves (the OG "go back to Africa") but that's about the extent of what I was taught.  Surely there's no darker motives involved in neglecting the longer lasting effects about US foreign policy in our education system...

Back at the CERN stop of the tram.  It being noon, I brought a tiny picnic lunch with me and munched on a carrot and some bread while awaiting my scheduled Uber.  

I was the first person of our 11 people tour to arrive.  Soon enough, 4 others joined and it turns out it was the American in their group that had organized this tour: hailing from Philly (I made a jab about greased light posts), she now works for some sort of world economic/governance forum and was family friends with our guide, Jeff.  Weirdly, when I mentioned I was in Geneva for two months, her first guess was that I was in finance.  

A few kilometers from the center of Cessy, we find the quiet campus of the CMS experiment.  The Jura mountains to the west and farmland everywhere else haha.  People were coming here to walk their dogs on the farmland paths.  And in theory, one could do a walking/biking tour of the LHC's perimeter but that seems an excessive exercise to see vegetable fields.  

I hadn't put it together at the Gateway of Science that the word "aimant" referred to magnets.  In English, we often talk about opposites attracting and use magnets labeled N/S as examples; here, it's already baked into the word.  Aimer (to like/love) → Aiment

Jeff showed up in a little CERN car with what I think were his boyfriend, a coworker at the ATLAS experiment and a summer student.  Another CERN car showed up with three other people I recalled seeing on the tram before my Uber; apparently they also had an employee connection.  Since this was a private tour, I think things were a little more off-the-cuff and our two guides (primary and secondary) weren't polished from doing tons of tours.  All said and done, I think Jeff did a great job while the other guy spent an hour playing the imbecile.  Oddly, while passing by the public tour I could have potentially been in, I recognized that guide as the lady who'd shown me the main campus and mentioned it's possible to visit CMS.  

The building greets you with this subdued display, I'm not sure what they're displaying considering the experiment is currently down.  We watched a short 5 minute video about the CMS and then visited a cloakroom to deposit stuff: if the experiment is running, you'll need to leave behind magnetic strip cards because the strong magnetic field of the experiment will erase it.    

Behind yonder doors lies the tunnel for world's most engineered piece of pipe.  It really is incredible all the tech that went into developing the LHC and the various components of this grand experiment.

Here we have examples of the LHC pipes that guide countercurrent streams of protons around as they accelerate.  Additionally, the walk to the CMS passed through the server room with the computers that capture, analyze, and record the detected collisions.  With millions of collisions occurring per second, these computers need to be fast and make decisions about which data to record and which to erase.  

I don't think I learned a whole lot more about the mission of the LHC compared to my previous visit to the main campus, but getting into the cavern 100m underground was still pretty cool.  I suppose having more interaction with some of the younger, less polished scientists helped to shed some light on the culture in CERN too; it is, after all, not a monolith institution but a hub of international scientists working for various organizations on fairly low stipends.  Turns out that January is the ideal time to make the underground tour, that's when they have the CMS disassembled and you can see the guts.  

Our guide pointed out that this machine was designed in the 80's and built in the 2000's, so it's a pretty incredible testament to long-term planning and frankly amazing what research has been accomplished with what could be envisioned/accounted for 40 years ago.  

The many layers of the CMS terminate in sensors that capture particles as best we can to determine trajectory and energy; by back calculating from these, some smart people can begin to deduce what happened at the point of collision.  

When I asked the guide about what a modern design would look like (a machine designed in 2020 vs 1980), he said that there is a project underway (High Luminosity) that will increase the density of the beams to ensure more collisions occur.  In the same breath, he said that it's a 20-year-old design and may not be as necessary as originally believed; the team has accomplished much more with the LHC than had been thought possible by making small tweaks on the detector side and the revolution in computing power.  

My tour finished strangely as I lost the group coming out from a quick potty break.  Since the only thing left was to close up shop, I figured the group had gotten a head start on the walk back to the turnstile; however, a quick walk to the turnstile revealed that they were still inside the building.  Rather than double back, I simply waited by the turnstile (which requires a badge to exit), until that 2nd CERN car appeared.  The guy recommended I simply walk behind his car as he passed through the vehicle gate.  So if you see my mug on posters about a security breach at CERN, know it was cause I was only trying to escape (like a muon).  

For a giant hole in the ground descending 100m, it's a fairly non-descript building.  The emblem evokes the cross-sectional image of the CMS detector with its many layers interacting with various particles. 

I ended up hanging out on this rock with the moss while waiting for the rest of the group to exit, watching locals come and go with their dogs.  

The paysage here really is quite charming, you'd hardly suspect a mad science experiment to be directly below you here.  

I called an Uber back to the GVA airport with the plan to take transit from there (my travel within Geneva is already paid for).  The driver was super cool, he even jokingluy questioned me about picking me up in an empty field with nothing but a 10L backpack and the airport as my destination 😆 He grew up the area on the French side, did studies elsewhere before returning back home.  He pointed out that Swiss salaries are roughly 2-3x more than on the French side and this has a distorting effect on the French région.  Growing up, he said it really was just countryside but more and more it is growing dense with commuters.  

Hands down, the train is better than the tram from the airport to Gare Cornavin.  If you're traveling in Geneva, having the Zone 10 pass to go where you like within Geneva lets you ride real trains within Geneva as well.  

My ride dropped me at the airport where I was able to snag the train to Cornavin and then a tram straight to activity number 2: the Patek Phillipe museum.  I was dubious about this museum since I'm not a watch enthusiast at all, but I ended up enjoying the experience.  I suppose I like museums that seek to explain the broader forces in history (economic, religious, and military) that shape a place, I hadn't expected a company watch museum to scratch that itch but I'm happier for it.  

It was interesting seeing all the watch fabricating machines; each one was manually actuated.  I suppose old sewing machines and looms were actuated with a pedal but these (according to a couple videos demonstrations) all involved using a hand-bow for their very specific purposes.

It's weird to think of a table of ladies spending the day making gold chain; it must've been a tedious task for even the most delicate of fingers.

Most of the descriptions of the history on the 3rd floor didn't do a great job of including English translations so while I got the jist of much of the history, I've no idea what some of the words' equivalents in English are (because I don't know those watch vocab terms in English 😅).  The story goes: Patek was part of the Polish resistance that got crushed by the Soviets and made his way to Geneva to start a watch company.  His initial partnership with a Czech ended up souring so he found himself a young, up-and-comer in Paris named Phillipe (not because his name was Philippe but because he had developed a keyless winding mechanism for watches).  And the rest is history/watches.

On the 2nd floor of the museum, there was a large collection of mechanical time devices and automata, basically starting from the origins of time piece craft in Geneva up to the dawn of wrist watches.  Per the museum, the influence of Calvinism resulted in sumptuary ordinances that were meant to prevent luxurious displays of wealth by people.  Given a huge influx of Hugenots to the city and the breadth of gold/silver smiths that came with it, people turned to making time pieces as they were "utility" items rather than simply luxury.  

Some of the items in the museum were simply silly, like putting watches inside knife handles or making a pocket watch from wood.  But I did chuckle a bit at seeing the mastery required for these crafts put to such eccentric, useless ends.  All that precision and tight tolerances for little clockwork devices, meanwhile the LHC is just smashing together as many tiny particles as they possibly can.  

With the museum done, I returned home for a quick bite before the last activity of the day: a piano concert in the Chêne Bourg district.  To be honest, I bought the ticket thinking it was for Friday night but it was a good excuse to get out to a new part of the city.  Before the pianist (a Russian lady who apparently started learning at age 4) came out on stage, the event organizer gave a quick spiel explaining that the event was aligned with International Women's Day, hence the ladies get in free promotion.  

Maybe it was related to Women's Day being the day before, but there was a rally in the Plain Palais grounds.  This was my first time walking around the Plain Palais without the giant brocante market, but I still took a moment to admire the Saleve looming overhead.

I had chuckled getting the tickets seeing the line in the bottom corner that the concert was free for women, like it was Ladies Night: chicks get in for free.  While the motivations for free admissions are antithetically opposed, it's kinda strange how they can result in the same outcome.  Though there very drastic differences between a concert hall performance and a Friday night wet t-shirt contest; context matters haha. 

The concert was very good.  I hadn't heard any of the songs she played before but there was a good blend of slow & thoughtful with fast & furious.  I listened with my eyes closed for a little bit at the beginning but finished the concert with replenished vigor.  And the pianist finished out with an encore of a jazz number called "Stay with Me."  Despite desperately trying, the crowd couldn't squeeze an extra song out of her after that 😆 

Imagine my surprise, just as the concert finished and people were beginning to walk off, the far wall of the concert hall lifted up and tables of bites and bottles of wine & champagne were revealed!  Tant mieux!  A show and cocktail hour, we should celebrate women more often!  Je rigole. 

Still, it was a pleasant surprise that hadn't been advertised on the street poster.  Champagne was served by the caterer, but wine was à volonté.  I ended up asking someone who didn't look preoccupied with conversation about whether the post-concert refreshments were a Genevois tradition, but she was just as pleasantly surprised as me.  A German (une allemane), she's been living in the Geneva area for quite some time and (if I understood correctly) plays a lot of piano herself.  In talking about differences in scope and culture of cities like Geneva, New York, and Hamburg, she made a point about Calvinism having had a large effect on the city but that it remains so international that it's hard to pin down un couture genevois.  Oh, and I picked up a super awesome tip for eating raclette à la bonne franquete: taking the pre-sliced raclette cheese I got at the grocery store, rather than melt it with an oven, I can simply nuke it in the microonde.  It's so logical that I'm almost ashamed (as a chemical engineer) to not have reached the conclusion on my own 😅

Quick, easy, and highly effective.  I'll have to confirm how the Swiss and French think of this method.