ullivan Upper Physics Department Invade Europe (Well visit CERN!)
The purpose of the trip was to visit the world renowned particle accelerator institute of Cern in Geneva. This was our inaugural visit which was largely organized by another member of the Physics Department Mrs C McCarey.
Well the flight was fairly uneventful and just after 1pm local time we arrived in Geneva. There are many things you can say about the Swiss, but we were mightily impressed with the transport system so in no time at all we were walking through the sunny streets of Geneva following directions to the Youth Hostel.
The youth hostel was clean and well run so after checking in we headed for th
The rest of the afternoon was spent exploring the old part of the town, museums, street cafes for coffee and a pastry, cathedrals, more coffee houses, I sure you get the picture.
The group met up again at 7pm and everyone was in high spirits exchanging stories of what they had done with their free time. The walk back to the hostel, once again was by the shore of Lake Geneva, was very pleasurable if a little cooler than in the afternoon.
We sampled the delights of dinner in the youth hostel followed by a couple of hours of card games before we retired for the night.
After breakfast we headed into town to catch the train to CERN, the train was scheduled to leave the platform at 9.42am and at 9.42 that is just what it did. The sun was shining brightly as we arrived at CERN, it had been shining all morning, so we reported to reception and were given just over an hour to visit the Microcosm e
Our official tour started with a lecture by a recently retired researcher who gave use a very good talk on the background to the establishing of CERN, the work they are currently engaged in, and what the future may hold. We then did the short walk to the Atlas (one of the four detector sites on the large Hadron collider) control room. The detection system was explained in detail. The next part of the tour took us across the border into France where the complexity of build the LHC was explained and why one small leak in the coolant system took 13 months to fix and cost 30 million euros.
It was a very enjoyable trip and I am very pleased and proud of the 17 pupils who were excellently behaved and very good company. Roll on next year.
P Whittington