CERN

This morning I went on a two hour tour of CERN (among other things, site of the creation of the World Wide Web by physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990) just outside of Geneva with a fellow Hopkins student, Victor. Unfortunately, the Large Hadron Collider is closed to visitors since it is currently operational and busy colliding beams of subatomic particles into each other to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and answer questions about the nature of the universe. No big deal.

The entrance to the main reception building:

 A map of the Large Hadron Collider with particle beams going around Geneva and into France (not the best quality, the room was dark but flash ruined the photo):

We also got to see the Universe of Particles exhibit at the "Globe" --- a sphere 40 meters in diameter made entirely of wood, representing the Earth's future (from the 50th anniversary of CERN in 2004). Here's Victor in front of the Globe far away and up close:

The benefit of going on the tour was that we got to go to the building for ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), one of the seven particle detector experiments constructed at the Large Hadron Collider. ATLAS is 45 meters long, 25 meters in diameter, and weighs about 7,000 tons. The experiment is a collaboration involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 175 institutions in 38 countries. It was also one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson earlier this year --- I still couldn't explain Higgs boson if my life depended on it but I am including that tidbit because that is what Wikipedia told me. Here is the building with a large artistic rendering of the ATLAS detector along with the ATLAS control room:

My gift to myself was to purchase a book called "Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles" by Professor Paul Halpern to get a crash course in what particle physics is all about. Looking forward to reading it! Maybe then I will understand the Higgs boson... Probably not.

And we will end on a picture of me in front of an example of the particle accelerator: