CERN visit

I’m doing my best to make the most of the rest of my time in Switzerland. One example of this came a couple weeks ago when I was able to join my Finnish friend Erkki on a trip to visit CERN, the large particle physics campus on the outskirts of the city. CERN is where the Large Hadron Collider (basically the world’s largest particle accelerator) is nearing completion and where scientists will be looking for so-called “God particles” that may give better understanding to the Big Bang. It is what some people think will be the end of the world. I will probably get many of these details wrong because I am not a scientist, but Erkki is an engineer and worked on the data collection panels at one of the accelerator sites.

For an overview of the whole thing, I recommend listening to Kurt Anderson’s excellent Studio 360 podcast which this week happened to discuss CERN:



Here’s what I can explain: the basic layout of the accelerator is a very large underground ring. There are actually a series of rings, in which the particles are loaded and then transferred until they finally get to the larger outer ring. At various points along these rings are a series of experiments designed to collect different types of data. The experiment we visited was CMS which is actually over the border in France. (Here’s a diagram from Wikipedia:)


At this site, protons will be smashed into each to try and find new subatoms. Each type of particle has a certain properties that give it a certain trajectory when collided. These trajectories are picked up by the data collectors and can then be used to determine what types of particles were produced. If previously unknown trajectories are detected, these may represent the “Higgs boson,” a hypothetical undiscovered subatomic particle. It’s all very dense, but if you are interested in learning more, check out the Wikipedia page about the CMS site which gives almost as good an overview as Erkki. (But not quite.)

Anyway, I didn’t know what to expect the accelerator to look like, but I certainly had something in mind like a sterile white lab. Instead, it was a massive mutli-colored mechanical construction that was more on the scale of space exploration. Very impressive. Here are the photos:


The throughly impressive data collection station at CMS


The even more impressive heating and cooling controls


Me in front of the accelerator


Once the experiment goes live, this fun retinal scanner will make sure only official people can get in. Side note: I didn’t know real retinal scanners already existed.


The whole thing is about 100 meters underground. It doesn’t seem like it when you’re down there, but we climbed the stairs back up, and I assure you it’s deep. Here’s my proof (creepy yellow lighting an added bonus).