Autumn 2017: Nerds in Ginevra*

Cheese and fondue and lakes and snow and science.

Northwest of Ginevra, in a town called Meyrin, is yet another multicultural community of professionals, in yet another triumph of global cooperation: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN.

Parts of it are open to the inquisitive public, so we’d signed up for the PhD-guided, English-language morning group. (The other option was French, and neither of us was up to scientific snuff there.)

This was early on a Monday morning.

I suppose you don’t really know somebody until you’ve: awoken in a foreign city with them; realized that you’d better leave in the next few minutes lest you commit the Swiss cardinal sin of tardiness; tumbled out of your Airbnb in such a rush that one of you forgets their passport and you have to go back for it; then forgotten where you’ve parked the car and spend a few minutes wandering down the wrong street; then found yourselves right in Ginevra’s rush hour with only Google to guide you because neither of you have ever driven in this city prior to yesterday and of course one of you is hopeless at navigating and spends the time doing hair and makeup instead; and then miss the final turn which would have taken you to CERN’s parking lot.

The next U-turn rectified this, and we made it into CERN’s reception on the dot, harmony miraculously preserved.

CERN does an excellent tour, if your synapses can catch up with all the physics.

It’s led by a sharply humorous, articulate scientist; there are impressive stops, including CERN’s first particle accelerator and the Globe of Science and Innovation, mixed with slick, well-produced audiovisuals; and the highlight was being told that while we unfortunately could not go down to see the actual Large Hadron Collider – where, in case anyone needs reminding, they discovered the Higgs boson only a few years ago (!) – we were in fact standing right on top of it. 😱

As with every tour group, scientific or not, there is always that one person who asks all the smart questions; in ours it was an American who occupied our scientist while the rest of us gaped through the glass walls of the ATLAS experiment control room.

Fun fact: ATLAS was one of the experiments involved in the identification of the Higgs boson.

Another fun fact, apropos of nothing: CERN was also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

So. much. science.

This is why I cannot recommend the CERN visit enough. It’s free, it’s educational, it’s several magnitudes cooler than the usual tourist stops, it lets you air your inner nerd and you get to talk to people who work with the LHC for a living. What’s not to fangirl about?

***

Afterwards, my fellow nerd and I realized we only had ten francs between us. Smart, eh?

You really don’t know somebody until you’ve split ten francs for a coffee and a pack of biscuits, courtesy of the vending machine in the lobby.

This shared breakfast would have to tide us over the Alpine passes until we got to Italy, where the chances of acquiring much better (not to mention cheaper) coffee and freshly made biscotti were significantly higher.

*Because of K, who is Italian