Earlier this year, I visited Geneva. More importantly, I visited CERN; the particle physics laboratory. It is a very impressive and welcoming place; go if you can. On the French border, there is a 27 km long tunnel in the form of a circle, a particle accelerator named the Large Hadron Collider (hadrons are components of atoms: protons and neutrons, but not electrons). Full of fun facts, the temperature is -271.3°C, which is colder than outer space. This is because the electromagnets powering the accelerator are superconductors at this temperature. The particles reach 0.999999991 times the speed of light. And so on… you get the picture (don’t tell me you’re not fascinated!).
I said welcoming: there is an exhibition covering five expo halls, where scientists working on real experiments hang about, keen to explain and answer questions. There is a guided tour that takes visitors into some of the labs and control rooms. And everything is free, a short tram ride from Geneva Central Station (the trams are free too, with a voucher from your hotel). In fact, this is the spirit of the whole lab: it is paid for by the participating states. Only they can conduct experiments, but the results are freely available to all of humanity.
I was interested in the history of the facility, and it turns out it started in the 1950s when Europe was lamenting the loss of all those prominent physicists that moved to America during WWII. How should Europe keep up with America? The answer was to build the biggest particle accelerator in the world.
Has anything useful come from this particle physics laboratory? you ask. Well, the anti-matter factory has only produced enough anti-matter to heat a cup of tea since its inception in 2000. But the crystals used to capture the particles from the hadron collisions are used in medicine to diagnose cancer. So that saves lives. But the most famous invention from CERN came from the document management system: the World Wide Web, invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989.* Now… who has made the most money from the World Wide Web?
You decide what the moral of this story ought to be. All I know is that particle physics are cool. Superconducting cool.
So cool that the computer that ran the first www-server is on display at the CERN expo, and it is a NeXT – that’s the computer that Steve Jobs designed in order to get his job back at Apple.
