CERN and the Large Hadron Collider
Post date: 06-Oct-2009 19:28:20
Our visit to the CERN facility began like most days - waking up in the Geneva airport because we had no where else to sleep. Ok...maybe it didn't begin like most days.
Try as we did, we were not successful in finding accommodations while in Geneva. We looked at
hotels - $400 per night. We looked at Bed & Breakfasts, but they were too far outside of town. All of the hostels were booked up. We tried couchsurfing and even contacted the "emergency need a couch" group, but still no luck. Eventually, we succumbed to the fact that we were going to be spending the night on the ground, so we had better find the best place to do it. Internet to the rescue with The Budget Traveler's Guide To Sleeping In Airports. We vowed first thing in the morning to never do that again!
So, what exactly is CERN? It's basically a huge lab for scientists around the world to come and
conduct experiments related to Particle Physics. There's a huge particle collider called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and what it does is both simple and complex. It takes
the protons from Hydrogen molecules, speeds them up to near light speed and then smashes them together. Scientists can then measure the effects of the collision to help humanity understand some of the intricacies of the first few moments of our Universe.
CERN and the LHC are so large that they actually span two countries: Switzerland and France. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is a huge 27km long pipeline 100m underground. We started our tour of the facility in Switzerland and ended the tour in France.
The museum at the CERN facility is a wealth of information. Even though it's really just two large rooms, we were occupied (read: Colin was occupied) for the better part of two hours. The museum gave a great account of how CERN began in 1954 and some of the early experiments conducted back when it was only able to accelerate electrons (electrons are smaller than protons and therefore easier to accelerate).
We also were privy to the building of the Anti Matter Spectrometer (AMS) which expects to detect large quantities of anti-particles in order to prove the existence of anti-matter stars. It also plans on detecting dark matter, but no one was able to sufficiently explain to me how exactly it was going to do that...I suspect that no one really knew (Colin Note: must follow up with leading scientists at another time).
This AMS system is basically the size of a mid-size car and is planned on being sent up to the International Space Station sometime next year. Unfortunately, I suspect that this will never actually happen since the US has announced the discontinuation of the Space Shuttle program. The people at CERN were not amused when I asked about this little hiccup in their plan.
After the huge amount of fun we had at CERN, we headed back to the train station to check ou
r email and find out if we had any place to sleep for our second night in Geneva. And guess what? We had the great pleasure of spending another wonderful night on the 0.5 star Geneva airport floor. It was cold even with fleecy jackets below us to protect us from the floor, and our jackets on us as blankets. We locked our two most important backpacks to the wall, popped in our ear plugs and curled up to the south wall in the departures area.
Even with our distractions and exhaustion it was still
a rough two nights and 3 days wearing the same clothes. It was funny the first night but it was painful the second night. We were not the only people bunking in the airport, either. We met a backpacker from England who slept in the airport for 3 nights (including the 2 nights we were there) because he couldn't find a hostel with vacancy or a hostel that he could afford. He looked much warmer than us in his sleeping bag.
Not showering for 3 days was good practice for the Trans-Siberian since we will have a 4 day and then a 3 day stretch with no access to showers. On a 6 month trip it's not too bad if we only had 2 homeless nights in the airport.
Too see all 80 of the neat pics from our time in Geneva, check out this link, or start up the slideshow below.