CERN

CERN is one of the places I wanted to visit while living in Geneva, but when I attempted to book a tour, I was told the English tours were booked until the end of October. The stars must have been aligned, because one of my classmates, Kaci, met an American on a train who actually works there, so she set up a group tour for us the Monday before I left Geneva. CERN is the place I mentioned earlier as having a black hole—turns out, this isn’t exactly what’s going on. They organization is famous for doing lots of crazy science stuff, including inventing the world wide web, and right now all the buzz is about an experiment that’s going to be run next month that will essentially recreate the big bang that created the universe. The tour was pretty tech-heavy and at times a little over my head (I was trying extremely hard to channel my junior year of high school physics class…..) but what they’re done is create a massive tube that runs a 27 km circumference and is buried 100 km below the surface of the ground. If all goes correctly, they’ll shoot millions of protons at each other faster than the speed of light and monitor what happens when they collide, in an attempt in trying to see what happened during the original big bang. We were told the heat created from this collision is 100 billion times hotter than the surface of the sun, so I was thinking, wouldn’t that burn up whatever tubes in which this collision takes place? Turns out the size of the ball of heat is only about 5mm x the width of a hair, so this isn’t a problem. I also asked if this experiment is run only once (seems like a lot of money to put into watching one impact), but it will be run continuously for months and months. The only downtime is when the protons are being loaded into the tube, which takes 4-5 hours per day. My only remaining question—where do you get protons?? It’s not like you can go to the grocery store and pick some up. And if they’re too small to see, how do you know they’re actually in there? These are the things that were going through my thoughts during the tour. Some people are concerned that this impact will create the infamous black hole and that everything will get sucked into the black hole and it will be the end of the world as we know it. Our tour guide put that rumor to rest, telling us even if a black hole were created, it would be so small that it would evaporate almost simultaneously with being created. Now I can sleep at night.

Picture: The 3-D movie portion of the tour. Most 3-D glasses have one green lens, one red. The ones are CERN have different polarizations in the different lenses to get the same effect.