It was good to be back in a French speaking city. Finally, I could read shop signs and bus ticket machines. I could guess my way through Italian, but Hungarian, for instance, turned my brain to noodles trying to make sense of it.
I had just one thing I had to see in Geneva, or I wasn't leaving.
CERN
CERN stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. The name has since been changed to European Organization for Nuclear Research, but they kept the acronym.
CERN contains quite a few different scientific contraptions. Some work together, others work alone. All are for a common goal:
To discover the Higgs Boson, and better understand the beginnings of our universe.
In a nutshell, CERN smashed particles together at high speeds and looks at the chunks that fly off.
Specifically, they're looking for the Higgs Boson.
Now I don't pretend to know a lot about this part of physics, I've yet to take any quantum classes at all. But from what I do understand, the Higgs Boson is a hypothetical particular type of elementary particle. It has certain properties that, if it were confirmed to exist, would help to explain how other elementary particles have mass. It would also hopefully help gain evidence for Super Symmetry, a concept I'm not comfortable enough with to explain.
To see an actual out of commission collider and get the full tour, you need to book reservations WAY in advance. I checked over two months before I left for Europe, and I still could not get a reservation.
Not to be disappointed, there are two other free to the public exhibits. One was a more interactive physics lesson. You started with little demonstrations that proved the basics. Copper coils with magnets, lights shining through holes, gold foil and fake alpha particles etc. Then it slowly eased you into less tangible concepts until finally you got into the hypothetical.
I really would like to go back for the full tour after I take a few more classes. I learned a lot, but I also think there was a lot that I missed.
The other part of the CERN exhibit was a huge globe that had all these interactive touch spheres that showed you how CERN operated more in depth. There was also a "movie" that played every fifteen minutes in a different language. The"movie" played on every surface on the inside of the globe. It explained why they were smashing particles and what new discoveries could mean. Each collision produces insane amounts of data that are sent and analyzed by different scientists all over the world. I thought the collision patterns themselves were kind of pretty looking. You can google LHC collision images, or there is one you can sort of see an example in one of my pictures.
The only other ambition I had in Geneva was to see the Palace of Nations.
The Palace of Nations was originally built to be the headquarters of the League of Nations, which was formed after WWI by the ideas of Woodrow Wilson. Speaking of which, as a president we learn so little about (all I knew is he was the only president with a PhD), he is pretty popular in Europe. At least in Geneva alone, there were several buildings and such named after him.
Anyways, the League of Nations fell apart at the start of WWII (ironic, as preventing war was one of its higher objectives), and after WWII came the modern United Nations. The Palace of Nations became the Geneva UN headquarters. Fun fact, it was the Geneva UN headquarters since 1946, but Switzerland did not join the UN until 2002. Now, while the main headquarters are of course in NYC, certain branches of the UN are actually run from Geneva. The United Nations Human Rights Council is stationed there. The other ones I can recall especially also had to do with human rights, some aspects of war, and also genocide.
When you arrive at the palace, you MUST have your passport. When you enter the grounds, you are actually leaving Switzerland and entering a neutral zone. I actually arrived just in time, as you must also be with a tour guide, and they only run two sets of tours per day.
The tour mostly consisted of seeing the conference rooms, from both spectator views and member views. On the floor of the UN, each seat had headphones that they would select to hear one of six channels. Each channel was one of the six spoken UN languages that six interpreters would be simultaneously translating whoever was speaking on the floor at that time.
This meant that in order to be a UN representative, you must speak either English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, or Russian. These were not chosen randomly though, they are the six most spoken languages in the world.
One of the more interesting aspects is the UN logo. It is a globe surrounded by two olive branches symbolizing peace. The cool thing is, the globe is actually looked at from the north pole, as to symbolize that no country or continent is above another.
We saw two particularly remarkable conference rooms. One had extremely large sepia murals, by I believe a Spanish artist, representing the succession of humanity.
They. Were. Amazing.
The other conference room that was beautiful had a ceiling designed by Miguel Barcelo. He used different materials and was advised by many different engineers to get the desired stalactite effect, then followed it up with spray paint. Apparently the artist's research and brainstorming process was just about as long and as costly as the actual finished project itself. It was definitely interesting and beautiful, but it makes you think, couldn't that money have been put towards helping people? They spent tens of millions on this ceiling. Which sort of leads to a deeper question.
Developed countries spend millions and millions on art and other types of aesthetics. Meanwhile, undeveloped countries may not have clean water. Shouldn't we be forsaking art until the rest of the world reaches a higher standard of living? That isn't necessarily my opinion, as a producer and consumer of art, it would be very difficult for me to see that happen. But it does make you think...
The day out and about concluded with dining in. The next day, Gabe would fly to Belgium for a short business trip, and I would also leave for my next city.
If your interested in more Switzerland, or what its like to be an American living in a new culture, Gabe and Lauren also run a blog.
Au revoir Geneva
Tegs
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