Large Hadron Collider - Meyrin

16 June - Day 92

We completed tidying up the Charmonix apartment and prepared to leave early today. The management inspects the apartment before refunding our 200 euro deposit on it. It is a 1 hr 10 min drive to Meyrin just outside Geneva. We were there at 9.30 for our 10.30 am tour. Meyrin is the location of CERN, the Centre for European Nuclear Research. There is no dyslexia here, in French the acronym is correct. I booked this tour in February.

Again there is no border control, but at the disused customs checkpoint, there were a couple officials selling vignettes. Switzerland uses the vignette system for the highway tolls. You have to pay 40 CHF for a year ending December. $54 for driving on about 5km of Swiss motorway in our case.

We were early, so I asked if we could use the cafe to get a coffee and breakfast. Negative, cafe was for staff only, but we could use the vending machine. That didn't take long, so to kill the rest of the time we did the self-guided Microcosm Tour. This exhibition shows the sub-atomic side of physics (the period between the big bang and formation of planets).

Here is Marcus pitting his strength against the "strong force". (There are four kinds forces: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, eletromagnetic and gravity). Strong forces hold together quarks, the components that make up neutrons and protons.

Our very own Nobel prize winning Sir Ernest Rutherford from Nelson features here too, as the person who discovered things were made up of atoms (not fire, wind, earth and water).

The other exhibits were around the equipment used and previously used by CERN in their experiments.

We have detectors for detecting and recording behaviour and energy levels of sub-atomic particles.

The energy level detectors are called calorimeters (stolen from fat farms, I'd say).

We have cryogenically cooled magnets. Super cooled to reduce electrical resistance (to increase power). Magnets are used to accelerate particles. Particles must be +ve or -ve charged, otherwise the magnet has no effect.

CERN itself may be just a small cluster of buildings. But the large hadron collider (LHD) they built is 27km in circumference. A 100m underneath the wheatfields and cows grazing around Meyrin, there is this 7 storey high tunnel with supercooled magnets pumping protons at the speed of light 11,000 times a second around the 27 km circumference and 5 complex detectors picking up all the data arising from when the particles collide.

At 10.30am it is time to start our tour. The tour was lead by a mainland Chinese scientist. He explained that CERN is now a global collaboration effort, so that is why he is here.

The first part was a video of how CERN came to be. It was intended to keep Europe from losing scientists to Russia and US, because no pure physics research is being done in Europe. Finally in the 1950s the 17 european member countries agreed on the structure, funding and so on.

You can see the member flags in the car park. It was a very political process. Today they spend 1 billion euros a year on CERN.

The current objective of CERN is to: find out how the universe came to be, train new physicists and other scientists, make new discoveries to benefit mankind and unite the world under the language of science. So WWW came from CERN, and they think they can target photon attacks on cancer cells without killing surrounding cells.

The young Chinese researcher then took us through the theory behind why they are crashing protons at high speed. And how the LHC and the detectors work.

He also explained how the equipment were built and showed another video of the detector build process. We were taken to the LHC control centre where a whole bunch of scientists were monitoring the acceleration and collision of protons. He said that the hardest part was not accelerating the particles. Rather it was steering these very small protons to collide with each other head-on and release their component parts (remember? quarks) and any other particles no one knows about. These can then be detected and analysed. I thought they should consult our SH1 designers who have no trouble creating hundreds of collisions a year.

I have to say that this is a volunteer led tour and not Hollywood quality. If you are not interested in this sort of stuff, it will be slightly dissapointing.

Once the LHC and detectors have been installed, they are operated continously. So no humans are allowed down there. I guess it is too dangerous. Remember Marie Curie died from ovarian cancer because radiation poisoning was not understood back then.

Anyway he said that one of the detectors called ATLAS is scheduled to be taken off-line for upgrades and maintenance between 2013 and 2014, so anyone visiting can go down and have to look.

One of the questions these guys are trying to answer is why some particles have mass and substance, and some don't. For example protons and neutrons have mass, and photons (light particles), electrons (electricity particle) graviton (attractive gravity) have no mass. Dr Peter Higgs about 40 years ago said that mass is due to these bosons now called Higgs boson. So when they collide protons (which has mass), they are trying to detect Higgs bosons. For people high BMI indicates an excess of Higgs boson.

After this we went to this big globe.

Inside is an exhibition on the universe (as we know it today) and its relationship with the various kinds of particles. The darkened room is in brothel blue.

Our GPS took us to Segny 15 mins away in France to lunch and our motel. It is more cost reasonable to stay in France when visiting Switzerland, I thought.

 

17 June - Day 93

Segny is a very small but nice village. Good boulangerie, a few nice restaurants and a huge Carrefour at French prices (40% lower than Swiss). Wheat farms too.

But we are 8km from Geneva, so a visit is a must.

We took the bus instead of driving, I heard parking even on a Sunday was expensive. Bus fares are expensive too, 4.8 euros for one way. Luckily I read that weekends, 2 can travel a full price bus ticket. Other large cities charge 1.2 euros max for a one way trip.

Geneva is a lovely city. It has a lake and iconic fountain.

Elegant monuments and accurate clocks.

Old city and mainly closed shops on Sunday.

But unless you have family and friends, there is not alot on. Plenty of United Nation Agencies here.

One or two old banks.

After lunch we were back in the motel to reconfigure and eliminate weight from our baggage because we will be returning our car tomorrow to Peugoet.