Geneve and CERN

With Paris done we were on to Switzerland for a brief visit. We took the high speed TGV part way...




and then finished by bus. One nice thing is the Eurail pass we have is only offered in first class – and it's pretty comfortable. I love train travel.

Anyway, one reason for going to Switzerland was for me to go to CERN – the location of the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. This is also the focal point of Dan Brown's current book and film "Angels and Demons". And like the film says, CERN has actually produced anti-matter, but in much smaller quantities than in the film. But enough about the film – the facility was amazing. It consists of a 27 km tunnel that's 100m below the surface of the earth. In it, they use 250,000,000 watts to accelerate subatomic particles and smash them together and then use a "computer farm" to analyze the resulting mess. They are trying to re-create conditions that existed around 0.00000000001 of second after the big bang, in search of the hypothetical Higgs Boson. Ya – I love this stuff!



On our tour we even got to go 100m underground to one of the experiment chambers. Here's me at the CMS chamber. You can see the beam tube entering the red CMS experiment equipment.







The actual beam tube is only about 4 mm in diameter, so all 27 km of the beam tube must have powerful and very accurate magnets to continually focus the beam. Here's a better look at the beam tube without me blocking the view.




I even got to play with the controls - although I thought I overheard someone say these weren't real. Whatever – they were just jealous!





In addition to CERN, we spent some time around Geneve. Never mind the Swiss Rolex watches; how nice is this flower clock...

I almost cut myself on a Swiss Army knife, but Amanda saved me at the last minute (but she still had time to snap this pic)

I saw this on a poster – there's music festival on now, and I thought this was interesting. I don't really know how to read music, but this just makes things even more confusing!

And speaking of interesting, one thing I like about travelling are the little surprises you get where you come across things that are different from home. Like this... What's wrong with this picture?

Ya – nine eggs in a carton. It should be either six or twelve! ;-)


After our two days in Switzerland we got on a train, and were bound for Milano, Italy.