Day 20
The day was absorbed by a bus trip along the autobahn between Stuttgart & Geneva with a stop for lunch in Zurich. Once in Geneva we had the opportunity to be tourists until the sun went down (at 10:30pm).
Day 21
Day 21 started with a guided tour of Geneva followed by a visit to CERN, the home of the Hadron Collider.
The tour of CERN started with a presentation by a 45 year veteran of CERN who took the understanding of science and the creation of the universe to another level. We learnt (I think) that we are made up of elements that have no volume and our density and mass are a factor of the force between the elements which make us up …. my translation …. which in Star Wars lingo is … the Forces within us.
Cern is focused on developing the understanding of the weak forces, medium forces and the strong forces which exist in the universe and the discovery of the Higgs Bosson is rather old hat now. They have moved on to bigger and better goals which include replacing the collider with a unit many time more powerful.
We then had a personal tour of one of the accelerators by an scientist from Thailand who is working on a number of particle physics problems. The tour included a look in the control center and the data center where they collect and manipulate the petabytes of data which the collider generates daily.
Some of the pictures below are of live data as it is being generated directly from the collider … amazing.
The science here is way beyond imagination and is capable of creating a mental melt down within minutes of the scientists talking you through the process.
Another amazing 2 days and amazing set of STEM experiences.
Tomorrow we start the journey home.
