CERN

Have you read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown? Or are you a big nerd? If either of those is true, you are probably familiar with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Both are true for me which is what piqued my interest in visiting CERN, and also this "open house" which was on Sunday.

As I understand it: CERN is a bad ass physics laboratory where scientists all over the world come to play and study and make cool new things happen. So they built this particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider and it goes underground - it's 3km (almost 2 miles) underground and 27km (about 17 miles) in circumference, spanning the Swiss and French borders. The LHC is new, and they are going to flip the switch I believe in the summer. It was open to the public to go underground on Sunday, which is where I went (after like 2 hours of waiting and 1 hour of taking random shuttle buses). What happens then is they send little particles zooming all around France and Switzerland at super high speeds. Then they smack them into each other, and it will re-create conditions that existed around the time of the Big Bang (or the "beeg bong" as I kept hearing the Frenchies call it). This will teach us more about the universe as we know it and such things like random particle masses that existed after the beeg bong and why the Cubs cannot win a world series (ok seriously, the answer must lie in science because there is no other explanation!!)

That is my layman's explanation of the LHC but you can read more about it yourself on the webpage dedicated to the new LHC. I basically spent my day wandering around CERN and its various sites and trying to learn about physics, which was quite complicated enough for me in school, when I was so horrible at physics that my reputation preceded me and most people refused to be my lab partner...Anyway a lot of the explanations were in French, about half of which I understood. You get my drift. It was also massively crowded because the open house was for ONE DAY ONLY and you see, even in Switzerland, people are not so refined that they can resist this kind of American gimmicky advertising!

Well CERN was interesting, but it won't make for much of a blog. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to explore the world wide web (which was invented at CERN) if you have more interest in these subjects. There's a lot of cool experiments going on over here!