CERN and more Geneva

The Globe at CERN

Woke up bright and early yesterday to head down to CERN. Admittedly I never heard about CERN til I watched Angels and Demons but it was enough to pique my interest.

Anyhoo, we made our way there in time for our 1030am tour. Our tour guide was a young guy with a Phd (of course...) in Particle Physics (like duh...) and we started it with a video about the history of CERN etc. After that the guy opened up the floor for questions and all these people started asking questions which totally flew over my head! Some girl asked something about string theory and its connection to something and some young boy asked something chim too. I probably never felt as stupid as I did yesterday. Our guide was pretty good and I did understand some of his answers but most of it flew over my head. CS asked something too, but I can't remember what, will leave it to him to add it in here.

After that we went one of the detectors for the LHC, ATLAS to watch another video (!). Actually in all honesty the videos were a little boring to me at least but the scientists do have a sense of humor, on the first floor the 2 videos of the ATLAS project were named 'A New Hope' and something along the lines of 'The Empire Strikes Back', lol... After that it was more questions of which again I couldn't understand half of them. We spent most of our time there watching the video explaining about the LHC and after that we had time to explore around the first floor where there were more explanations. We also got to press the emergency button, haha... All in all pretty cool stuff and the explanations were more layman so it was better for my little bird brain.

The tour was supposed to take 2.5 hrs in total but we took more than that mainly due to the numerous questions asked. In total, we only went to ATLAS and no where else. After the tour ended, we went to the Globe of Science and Innovation to catch the exhibition 'Universe of Particles'. Again pretty cool stuff but CS was way more interested in it than me. After that, we went to the Microcosm to finish looking at the exhibitions.

Universe of Particles at the Globe

All in all, pretty educational though they should probably have separate tours for people like myself who is a complete physics idiot and people who are way more technically inclined. It did bring back some memories of secondary school physics though, which was honestly a bit of a nightmare for me. All in all, if you are totally in this kind of stuff or even if you're not, I do think a visit there is a must if you are in Geneva.

After the heady morning, we headed down to Old Town Geneva to basically walk around. The Old Town was well, old, haha.... We saw Cathedrale St-Pierre, Jet d'Eau, Old Arsenal, Hotel de Ville. Pretty productive eh, hehe... anyway after a while we stopped near a playground where tons of kids were playing, all I can think of watching them play was that it must be very tiring to have to wear so many layers to go out to play, lol... There were also a bunch of old men playing giant chess in a park, pretty idyllic life.

All the Swatch watches ever produced since 1983

While walking to take the bus back to Ferney-Voltaire, we chanced upon a Swatch exhibition. The exhibition supposedly had all the watches Swatch had ever produced from 1983 onwards, though there were some missing ones, perhaps under repair? We had a fun time trying to spot our Swatch watches in the collection.

Swatch with Champagne cork

So far, it still feels like we are on a 2 weeks holiday or something, perhaps when we are into our first month, it will feel more like our major big adventure.