When science is your destination

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Huge clouds threatened the rain while I was cycling near the French-Swiss border. My sturdy City Bike rolled on all types of surfaces and only complained when I drove it in mudflows. The trail snaked along dormant vines, through forests and cabbage fields, and under the watchful eye of a hawk. At one point, I stopped to walk into an old cemetery and found Roman ruins.

The whole morning was so changeable and atmospheric that I often forgot about the biggest machine in the world. But then the trail was bent in a way that evoked the Large Hadron Collider, the reason for my visit to the outskirts of Geneva. I had just started a weeklong science-oriented trip, and my first stop was the particle collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is home to the 17-mile-long ring that is arguably the world's most famous scientific facility.

In fact, CERN is so popular that free spins are often snapped up in seconds to be offered. Having followed the CERN website for about two months, I finally found open spots at the end of January, which fortunately coincided with modest winter rates in Europe. So I booked a flight and started to study my physics.

The Large Hadron Collider accelerates subatomic particles called protons at almost the speed of light. At full speed, each proton zips around the collider 11,245 times per second, while CERN scientists encourage them to crush one on the other. Huge detectors and global computer networks traverse the debris of these collisions to try to find something new and interesting

In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider discovers the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle even smaller than a proton whose existence theorized but never found. The proof of its existence gave physicists the assurance that the standard model, the theory underlying their discipline, was solid.

He also helped CERN become a tourist attraction, although this process has already started. & Demons ", as well as the sitcom" The Big Bang Theory ". Most importantly, CERN attracted media attention in 2008 as the Large Hadron Collider was about to become operational. Several people who are not affiliated with CERN have stated that it is possible that the collider could cause a "black hole" destroying the world. Although the claim was denied, it helped CERN become a household name.

The day before my visit to CERN I pedaled along the Big Bang Pass road, which traces the path to the underground ring. In a bicycle rental store, I grabbed a free trail map as well as a brochure that featured the Large Hadron Collider through cartoon characters resembling Tintin. Everyone at CERN had a lot of fun designing multiple-choice questions like, "Which of these particles is in the LHC?" a) Simple b) Protons c) Croutons. "

After cycling for several hours, I was dangerously close to missing my long-awaited lap slot, so I turned around after a quarter turn in the ring. visitors, I locked up my rental bike and I tried to wipe the mud off the countryside from my hands and my pants.

The small reception area was Our guide was Klaus Batzner, a retired particle physicist from CERN, whose dizzying excitement of institution achievements largely outweighed my limited understanding of what he was saying It was not because of his accent, particle physics is so complicated that it was like trying to understand a foreign language.

Our visit started with a presentation on CERN, and perhaps in a blink of an eye to public awareness on the black micro-hole, the visit would receive less radiation than dental x-rays. So reassured, we crossed the tram line connected to Geneva to the control room of the Atlas Detector, one of two detectors who discovered the Higgs boson. Next to the live video stream of the detector was a plaque that summed up his noble mission: "Advance human knowledge, continue an endless quest to learn from where we come from and why the Universe is such that we see it today. "

The next morning, the threatening rain finally arrived. It was cold too, but I was fortified by a strong coffee and the kind of puff pastries that seem to happen by magic only in France and Switzerland. As I was going down to La Perle du Lac, the park on the shores of Lake Geneva, rain clouds were gravely crossing the sky and the city was still sleeping. I had planned another visit to CERN this afternoon, but first I wanted to go back in time several hundred years to the Museum of the History of Science

The museum occupies a 19th century villa originally built for Parisian bankers. Gold filigree walls and inlaid wood floors contrasted with the Calvinist character of Geneva's buildings. Each room contained science instruments dating from the 17th and 18th centuries: hand-carved celestial globes, sundials, astrolabes, Crookes tubes and cathode ray tubes (which led to the discovery of X-rays), first microscopes, oscillators and motors electric, I could have spent all day in this small museum, mainly because of the beauty of the instruments. Made of brass, wood, mirrors and the first groping electric wires, these machines still vibrated discoveries that they allowed. I looked through a 300-year-old microscope and imagined what it must have been to see hairs once invisible on a chip for the first time.

The tram ride from the museum to CERN was short and efficient, 20 minutes that lasted several hundred years. Walking towards the visitor center, the rain clouds rose to reveal a magnificent view of the nearby foothills. I could see the exact altitude where the rain had turned into snow, like a cosmic line drawn through the trees.

At CERN, I met Ana Godinho, the Portuguese director of education, communication and outreach programs at the institution. Belgian colleague François Briard. We discussed the fact that CERN has become a global name, as well as projects of the institution to build more facilities for visitors.

"The mystery around CERN works in our favor," said Godinho. "It's a huge effort – everything is important here, even though we're studying tiny particles that you can not even see." She marveled at the global interest that has invaded CERN during the discovery of the Higgs boson, even non-physicists were drawn to the adventure of finding it, she said.

Because CERN was in the midst of an annual shutdown. winter, usually between late December and mid-March, Briard was able to take me down to see the actual Atlas detector deep underground.I was standing on a small observation deck and stood mouth gaped in front of this multi-story machine, whose interior was open for maintenance.The detector was a vast array of mirrors and wires that looked like enlarged photography with a d & # 3939; insect that I had seen this morning at the museum.I took dozens of photos, but none of them did not really capture his reach and his greatness. By the end of 2018, the Large Hadron Collider will begin a 2 ½ year shutdown for major upgrades. Visits to CERN will not be affected, and there may even be a bonus for visitors in 2019 and 2020 due to potential opportunities to visit underground detectors, according to Briard.

As I finished my visit and went out, to the familiar sound of English with American accents. I peeked in the main hall of CERN and briefly listened to a presentation on DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino experiment. This international collaboration will transmit neutrinos back and forth over 800 miles of bedrock. I vowed to find out more, but instead, I shared a raclette-wine dinner with a gregarious Swiss couple, and I quickly forgot it.

A few days later, I came across the DUNE project in the suburbs of Chicago. . I was finishing my science tourism week with a visit to Fermilab, a national laboratory of the Department of Energy located in Batavia, Illinois, about 45 miles west of the city. It is home to the Tevatron, a predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider.

Like CERN, Fermilab is open to the public, organizing regular tours and also hosting permanent exhibitions in its impressive mid-century Wilson Hall headquarters. While waiting for the start of my tour, I discovered that the DUNE experiment is based at Fermilab. The proton accelerator of the facility will launch neutrinos to a detector being installed in Lead, South Dakota

CERN is involved in the construction of DUNE detectors, as is Fermilab helps to build important parts of the Large Hadron Collider. Main control room until it was time to start the free tour of the 4.26-mile ring of the Tevatron and its main detector, DZero, once a month. During its operational life from 1983 to 2011, Tevatron was the main site for international collaboration in physics, just like CERN today. Tevatron researchers discovered the top quark, another subatomic particle, and laid the groundwork for CERN's discovery of the Higgs boson

It has only been seven years since the Tevatron ignited its particle beam ever since. Today, the Tevatron is a time capsule highlighting the rapid progress of science, machinery and computer science. Our group of tourists descended a staircase illuminated by the buzzing and fluorescent lights and entered an area that smelled of my grandfather's basement tool room

. The elevators leading to the Large Hadron Collider, visiting the Tevatron, are seriously old. In the DZero control room, notebooks and pencils are still there where they were several years ago, the monitors seemed to have been redirected from the Apollo space program and a Macintosh IIci (US government property, according to a sticker prominent) sitting in the corner. Beside that, there was a Fermilab phone book of 2000.

During my week in Geneva and the suburbs of Illinois, I visited an exuberant foreign country called science. This has reminded me of so many reasons to travel – for pleasure, to gain new perspectives and new knowledge, or to feel more connected to someone you love. (I threw it last because my sister is a scientist.) However, I did not expect to be so inspired. Particle colliders and 300-year-old laboratory equipment have revealed the best angels of our humanity.

An object from the Museum of the History of Sciences of Geneva persisted in my mind for weeks afterwards. It was a slim tower made of copper, zinc, felt, glass and wood, and it shone with the promise of a new era. It was the first battery in the world, built by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in 1800. Like all the rest of the museum, its invention was a cornerstone to the wonders of Fermilab, CERN and our daily devices. The battery "domestic electricity," said the note accompanying the invention of Volta. I liked the picture of this: a tame fierce lightning tapped on the head and placed in a container for future use.

Since then, I have imagined contemporaries of Volta, and the physicist himself, looking at this first battery and reveling in the joy that comes from discovering new things, simply because it's in our inner nature to do it. That's why I loved being a scientific tourist, visiting these places at the forefront of human knowledge. It was a rejuvenating tonic, one that left me excited about the future. I felt the joy of Volta too.