I cannot believe I got to use that post title.
At any rate yes – conference over, there was one more Large thing we wanted to visit in Geneva – CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider. As an accelerator physicist, this place is pretty much sacred ground, even if I didn’t get to see any more than the normal public tour.
Still, the public tour is pretty good. You get to see the original synchrocyclotron built at CERN in the 1957, and used continuously up until 1990.
If you want to learn more about what a synchro-cyclotron is, and more about cyclotrons generally, you can check out the Wikipedia page on cyclotrons, which I wrote a fairly large chunk of. Incidentally, you probably DON’T want to be the luckless tour guide with me on your tour asking annoying technical questions.
The tour then progresses to the control center for ATLAS, which is one of the primary detectors on the LHC beamline. The detector itself, as well as the rest of the accelerator, is located deep underground, but we got to at least gawp at the folks in the control room.
ATLAS, incidentally, stands for “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”. Yeah.
In addition to the tour of the synchrocyclotron and detector buildings, there’s a small art museum located in a big wooden sphere, and a large science museum built directly over the road. The science museum was very well done, and did a solid job of trying to conceptualize what the LHC is for and accelerator physics more generally.
But with this final bit of entertainment extracted from Geneva, it was time to move on and see the rest of Switzerland! And I cannot say enough nice things about how easy it is to get around using the Swiss rail app. Imagine all the mapping and directions functionality Google maps, but it also lets you buy the tickets for pretty much every means of travel, including gondola.
Our first stop was the city of Bern, which immediately charmed us by feeling much less sterile than Geneva. No less f*ing expensive, though.
There was also a giraffe, for some reason.
We had dinner at the Kornhauskeller, a restaurant in a 200 year old corn cellar. The ambiance was really something.
As was the food, which was very… hearty. We had definitely moved into the more… Germanic part of the country, culinarily.
A bit more of a walk around town, including an amazing sunset view, and it was time to crash.
