From the Roman era to particle physics

After a very busy day visiting the UN and Geneva's Vieille Ville, there was still an early wake-up call the next morning so that we could drive to Meyrin (a commune in Geneva canton) for our scheduled visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).  Although the tour itself would not begin until 10 a.m., we had been advised to view the Microcosm, CERN's interactive museum of particle physics, prior to the tour in order to have a better idea of what we would be seeing.  Had our visit been scheduled in July, we would have been among the first visitors to view the displays in the new visitor center which opened 1 July and is now housed in this building.

As someone who attended schools in an area of the US during an era where females were, if not actively discouraged from studying classes in higher mathematics or sciences, generally not encouraged to do so, my background in particle physics is virtually non-existent.  So I am extremely happy to see that the Double Cs find higher mathematics and science fascinating, as indeed they are.  With HWMBO as a grandfather, I would expect nothing less from them. 

In any event, they appeared to enjoy the interactive displays.

They even had some fun with the mock-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where scientists are accelerating two beams of particles in opposite directions to more than 99.9% the speed of light to produce head-on collisions in order to create the kinds of conditions that scientists believe existed after the "Big Bang."  Nice try, Prince C, but no cigar, I'm afraid.

Our tour began with a short bus trip to one of the CERN facilities located in France.  The LHC itself is installed in a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference, buried from 50 to 150 meters underground between the Jura mountain range in France and Lake Geneva in Switzerland.  Because the LHC is now in operation, visitors are no longer allowed underground.  So we had to visualize what was happening there from our experience with the Microcosm, the various models on the tour and the explanations given by the guide.

The facility that we visited is the location where the superconductor magnets used in the LHC to accelerate the particles are tested.

There are thousands of different magnets of different sizes and varieties inside the LHC.  They include 1,232 dipole magnets of 15 meters in length which are used to bend the beams,

and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 meters long, to focus the beams.   Here is a model showing the interior of the LHC.

And here is one of our last looks at superconductor magnets that are destined to be used in the LHC.

More than 10,000 scientists and engineers from around 500 academic institutes and industrial companies worldwide are contributing to the LHC project.  Equipment has been built in many European countries, as well as in Canada, India, Japan, Russia and the United States.  CERN's projects and experiments are encouraging examples of what international cooperation and collegiality can accomplish.