Entrance to CERN Visitor Center.
Although I love travelling and I’ve been to some wonderful places, I always appreciate coming home.
-Tom Hadley
During the days we had left in Switzerland, I worked through a few items I still had on my to-do list. One of the first things Phyllis, Bill and I did was to go to CERN. The river went down enough that we could go back to Geneva by train without having to take any ersatzbuses. Once in Geneva, we took a streetcar to the CERN facility. It took us about three hours just to get there, so the entire day was used up in the excursion.
My brother is a geophysicist and I have a PhD in Relativistic Astrophysics, so our interest in the place is obvious (see previous blogs for a description of what happens at CERN). Phyllis was less intrigued about what happens there and I tried to explain it in simple terms.
Suppose you have a box that you think might contain something and you want to know what’s in it. Suppose, too, that it has no obvious opening and no apparent way to get into it. What would you do? One possible answer is to find a big enough hammer and smash the thing open. In the early part of the twentieth century, physicists new, by experiment, that various particles had some sort structure to them, but they didn’t know much else. They wanted to “see” inside the particles to discover that structure. So, they decided to “smash” them open to “see” what was there.
The problem is, the force that holds particles together, the strong nuclear force, is the strongest force in the universe. In order to break into a particle, one would therefore need a hammer with an incredible amount of energy. What physicists came up with was a way to accelerate particles, like protons, to speeds very close to the speed of light, then smash them into each other. This is done with particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Accelerator (LHC) at CERN. It is the largest accelerator in the world and the only one that can produce the energy required to find much of the fine structure of elementary particles. It turns out, when you ram particles, like two protons, into each other, you get a shower of other particles, that are the constituents of the original particles. By looking at those showers, you can determine a lot about what fundamental particles are made of.
We saw a number of exhibits and went on a tour that included the control room of the LHC. The accelerator is constantly running and data is collected and stored on computer 24/7. Physicists all over the world can then sort through that data at their leisure, accessible through the World Wide Web, and look for evidence that supports, or doesn’t, the various theories they have. The machine itself is huge, an oval about 17 miles in circumference, and has some very high-tech gadgets, like superconducting magnets. But the real magic is in the data that it produces.
In the days that followed our trek to CERN, Phyllis and I also went on some hikes in the Alps. There are a number of trails near where we were that traverse across the mountains, more or less horizontally, although there is always some up and down. We were in the mountains, you know. I spent most of my life in the mountains of Utah and Colorado and I miss them, now that I live near the coast. The snow-covered, majestic thrusts of granite high into the sky is breathtaking and the air is so clean and full of the fresh smell of nature. The refreshing gurgling of rushing mountain streams, unmuddled by the background din and hum of a city, makes it so easy to appreciate and enjoy the magic of the universe we live in. I only wish I could share it with Waldo…
There were many other things that we did as well. I gave a copy of my novel, “The Devil’s Vial,” to the bibliothèque in Sion, we watched a couple of soccer championships on a wide screen TV in a local bar, and ate a lot of good food and drank some fine wine. Finally, it was time to go home and Phyllis and I took the train back to Geneva and our separate flights back to Boston.
Our journeys back were pretty uneventful and ran as planned. I did have a 16-hour layover in Copenhagen, but I opted for that when I bought the ticket (due to the savings in price). I spent the time napping as I could (a skill I developed during medical training) and noshing now and then. For the entire return trip, the only real snag was that the Sumner Tunnel in Boston was closed for construction and I had to wait a very long time at the airport before the shuttle bus came to pick me up and take me to Framingham (where my son-in-law met me and drove me home).
I was a couple of hours late when I got Waldo, but I finally made it. Sixteen days, we were apart. He was frenetic and happy to see me, excitedly running and prancing. Waldo seemed to enjoy the people who were caring for him, but was definitely eager to get in the car. For a little while, I think he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, not sure just what else was going to happen to him. But after a couple of days at home and our old routine, he was back to himself. If anything, I think his experience has made us closer to one another. I sure know I’m happy to be back with him. Maybe one day, I can bring him with me.
Then I could call these blogs, “World Wandering While Walking With Waldo.”
