4/29/2017, Geneva Switzerland.   Sunny and chilly.   37F/56F

And what, you ask, is CERN?

For a science guy, CERN is like the Holy Grail – it’s the cutting edge of basic research where scientists work to discover the most basic atomic and subataomic ingredients of the universe and figure out what happened at the Big Bang. If Galileo and Isaac Newton were alive today, CERN is where they would be working. It’s also a sort of understated crossroad of science and spirituality, i.e. what happened at the Big Bang? What could it be other than Creation, scientifically measured, without mythology?

In short, CERN is the biggest atom smasher in the world. The guts of it consists of a circular tunnel just outside of Geneva straddling the Swiss-French border, It is about 16½ miles in circumference and is buried an average of about 30 stories underground.

By the way, CERN is an acronym that stands for the European Council for Nuclear Research, or rather for its French name: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire”. The United States is not a member state of CERN, although it does contribute. The U.S. has its own colliders including one in Illinois, the Fermi Lab, that used to be the world’s largest before CERN.

Photo 5225, aerial photo of CERN showing circular tunnel.

Geneva airport is at left; the pointing finger at upper L indicates the CERN complex

So who would want to travel long distances go to see a large hole in the ground? Quite a few it seems. It turns out that getting tickets for touring CERN is something like getting tickets for a U2 rock concert. CERN only issues tickets for their tours exactly 15 days before the date of the tour, and if you don’t get there the first minute of the first day, you’re going to be out of luck. And this is what happened to us. Ticket distribution is all done online, and we were in Dubai 15 days before our targeted date. The trouble was that getting online at the appointed minute, the computer connection in our Dubai hotel room was slow enough that by the time we got through, the tickets were already gone! Damn!

In the meantime, we had already gotten hotel reservations and air tickets for Geneva, so we were going to go visit Geneva, CERN or no CERN. No problem. Who wouldn’t want to visit Switzerland with all those gorgeous snow-covered Alps and clock towers to see? Even if we weren’t able to get in on the underground tour, they still have a visitor’s center at CERN and we would check that out.

Photo 5189, Crossing the Alps: Rome to Geneva

B-r-r-r! This has been an upside down spring: from 102 degrees F in Dubai, to 70 in Rome, to 37 our first morning in Geneva. My question to the clerk at the front desk: do we have to take a taxi to get to CERN? Answer: heavens, no. Just catch the #18 tram three blocks over and ride it to the end – CERN is at the last stop at the end of the line. Same with a train downtown from the airport: free tickets given out at the airport, from where we could walk to our hotel. Great public transportation those Swiss have!

Photo 5220, CERN Visitor’s Center, Globe of Science and Innovation

Although we missed out on the tour of the underground facilities, the Visitor’s Center was open. And it turned out that the exhibits were excellent, including the best short explanation of protons, neutrons and quarks that I ever heard – much clearer than anything I ever heard in school.

CERN Visitor’s Center exhibition hall (Source: https://visit.cern/)

All those pods that look like eyeballs are exhibits on various aspects of nuclear physics. The flat object on the floor at the center of the room is a horizontal screen where they project a very splashy video from above about the history of the universe from the Big Bang, through the formation of matter, the formation of stars and galaxies, and down to our Solar System at present. It is done with some superb graphics and is very cool.

So how does CERN the atom-smasher work? The scientists rev up two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions in two special magnet-lined pipes inside the 16½-mile tunnel “racetrack” to about the speed of light. Then they smash those proton beams into each other head-on to create conditions of heat and pressure on a tiny scale similar to the birth of the universe to study what happens. Protons are so tiny that only a small percentage of the intersecting proton beams actually produce collisions. Out of some 200 billion circulating protons in each “bunch”, only something like 40 collisions occur when 2 bunches cross. Still with such a small percentage of collisions, there are enough protons in the beams to produce about a billion collisions per second. After all, at near light speed, the protons go around the racetrack 11,245 times every second.

Some of what comes out of this is knowledge of things like anti-matter (a mirror image of matter that explodes in the presence of matter), dark matter (massive stuff we can’t see and don’t know what it is, but that causes major gravitational effects on the behavior of galaxies) and dark energy (which comprises about 70% of the universe, which propels the expansion of the universe without becoming diluted).

CERN calls this facility the “Large Hadron Collider” or LHC. (“Hadron” is another term for protons and neutrons.) To accomplish this, the conditions in the CERN proton racetrack pipes are brought approximately to those of interstellar space, i.e. a near total vacuum cooled to 2 degrees above absolute zero! This is probably the coldest place on the planet.

As you might imagine, this is no small feat. Described simply, super-cooled magnets accelerate the protons through a series of progressively larger racetracks leading to the big 16½ mile tunnel as the magnets force them into circular paths. To keep the amount of electrical power used to accomplish all this to a manageable level, those magnets are cooled down to within 2 degrees of absolute zero (i.e. –271 degrees C) inside the proton “racetrack” pipes to give the magnet wires super-conductor properties (i.e. no resistance that would drain usable power). This goes on for hours. Really? They can do that? It boggles the mind.

The CERN Proton “Racetrack” (Source: https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider)
Note the gentle curve of the tunnel

The little boy in me wants to know if there is some kind of big roar or vibration that goes on when the proton-colliding is going on. You know, like when a jumbo jet takes off, or a big line of locomotives goes by pulling 100 rail cars, or the roar of tons of water going by in a hydro powerhouse. There’s nothing quite like the big rumbling, earth-shaking display of POWER! As yet, I haven’t seen any reports on how much noise the LHC makes when it’s running.

Walking through the streets of Geneva to and from CERN was very enjoyable. There is still that feeling of orderliness, cleanliness and precision everywhere that you expect from the Swiss. The buildings have a kind of Swiss look to them with pitched roofs, turrets, and lots of balconies decorated with flower boxes. There are lots of parks, and the city is small enough that you don’t get the feeling of being oppressed by the traffic and hordes of people like in a larger city.

Photo 5201, street scene in Geneva, Switzerland

The only paper tickets we had for any part of our transportation on this trip were for the train trip from Geneva to Lyon, France, Those tickets I carried around in my money belt until they became dog-eared … shades of the old days when everything was on paper! After the CERN tour, we walked to the downtown train station to see if additional seat reservations were needed since our tickets did not show seat numbers. Odd as it may seem, seat reservations are sometimes sold separately from your train ticket, and you are not guaranteed a seat if you don’t have one! I didn’t want to have to be dealing with a lack of seat reservations just before boarding the train the following morning, not knowing if we would have seats. Also, since Switzerland is not in the EU, we would have to go through customs to go into France, and I wanted to find out where to go for that, so there would be no confusion in the morning at the last minute. In big train stations, where to find your platform can be confounding when they don’t post the train times up on the big boards until 10 or 15 minutes before scheduled departure.

Planning our own world trip had its advantages like going only exactly where we wanted, seeing exactly what we wanted, and doing it economically. But there were drawbacks too. Probably the biggest drawback was having to plan every last detail, knowing where we had to be and exactly how to get there. For an organized tour these sorts of details would be taken care of by a tour operator, but in our case, it required a lot of time and effort to keep the whole trip moving. In the case of the Swiss train seat reservations, it turned out that there were no reserved seats on the Geneva-Lyon leg of our train trip … you just had to go and grab a seat. Fortunately it was not crowded so it was not a problem at all. Solving problems on the fly was exciting, but also wearing.

We had only one full day in Geneva, then were off to Nimes, France to see some of the best-preserved Roman ruins anywhere, plus one of the most celebrated ultra-modern bridges in the world.