a Review from the Top: Geneva

September 1, 2019

Geneva

The trip to Geneva (described in the last post) proceeded like, well, clockwork:

(we love these Stoptogo Swiss clocks. We bought one for our kitchen)

And that was a good thing. We arrived in Geneva around 1:30, and had tickets for a guided tour of CERN at 3:00. (Doreen really indulges me). I had to get up at 1:30 AM 15 days ago to get these tickets.

The hotel (Hotel de la Paix) was great - they gave us a three day Geneva Pass, so we could just take the metro to the site.

It is quite a place, but not really set up as a tourist site. Doreen described it as NASA before it became Disneyfied.

There is real work going on here, and they haven't taken too much time to cater to fans of the Big Bang Theory.

Me, CERN, and Sputnik. All from 1957.

The first piece of equipment installed at CERN was the Proton Synchrotron (now decommissioned)

This was the machine used to confirm the pion (pi meson) theory:

π+	→	e+	+	ν e
π−	→	e−	+	ν e

in 1958. Very cool.

Some of the original office equipment. An adding machine and a manual typewriter.

Big wrenches.

Here I was, trying to free the Pions!

This is what the Large Hadron Collider tubes look like:

The Atlas experiment building:

They have painted the outside to look like what the equipment is inside - to scale.

A magnet (prototype)

Atlas control room:

Demo stuff.

Then back to our hotel. (It was very hot. Not because of radiation from CERN, plain old solar radiation)

This is the view from our hotel room:

The Jet d'Eau! Famous all over the world as the symbol of Geneva.

Geneva's Flower Clock

Lenin lived here:

Another mechanical clock with little figures that appear at noon.

This IS Switzerland, after all.

And a diorama of Geneva in 1814!!!

I love this sort of thing.

And this sort of thing! John Calvin's chair!

I was afraid to touch it, but then I remembered that Calvin believed in predetermination. So it doesn't matter what I do, I'll be in heaven if that is what is ordained no matter what I do!