On my way to La Clusaz, while dining in a chinese restaurant in Genève, I got enlightened that CERN is so close that it would be a pity not to visit it. To physicists CERN is almost what Mecca is to Muslim people – a symbol of unification, friendly cooperation, several Nobel price winners home and a place where impossible means you just have to work a bit harder on it. It is where the Internet was born, many particles were discovered (making it even harder to understand the basic principles of our Universe) and where the famous Large Hadron Colider has been working for a couple of months.
The Centre is located in a north-western part of Genève, Meyrin. Normally you would just follow the main road but we were surprised by roadworks and we had to weave in the village for a half an hour or so, spending unbelievable amount of money for my mobile Google Maps – but that’s another story. We reached it – a great ball-shaped (or maybe I should say particle-shaped) red construction to the right told us we reached our destination. The receptionist said that all guided tours were fully booked for the next 3 weeks but we could see the Microcosm museum.
The museum contains several exhibitions – from the basic physics through the history of the Internet to detailed story of proton-antiproton collision experiment. It starts with a presentation of Four Forces – all of them with simple experiments that help you remember their properties like “how difficult it is to separate quarks in a proton” or “how much would this thing weight on the Moon”. You can remake Thompson’s and Rutherford’s experiments, see how intense decay is from different elements, watch sparks caused by cosmic rays on big detectors or see how a magnet changes electrons’ path in a Cathode-Ray Tube. There are many such small check-it-yourself devices which are a real fun! There’s also a room with ?-shaped earphones where physicist of various nations try to answer questions like “where does the mass come from” or “is our Universe symmetrical”.
In the next section you can learn a lot about CERN former experiments and the beginning of the Internet. See how particles are accelerated and why a milimeter precision is crucial in those experiments. You can also see a part of LHC and other devices used for answering the most important physicists’ questions. The “craddle of WWW” exhibition is also worth seeing. You can read a bit about The Grid – a new CERN child. Will it expand just as the Web did? A riddle: what’s this?
The last room is marked as “for people who know something about particle physics”. Don’t let it discourage you – you’ll find it interesting even if you hardly understand what the story tells. This part is completely devoted to proton-antiproton experiment, it’s difficulties and consequences. Ever wondered how heavy a neutrino is?