Tour CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva

“As a group, we all arrived at Geneva airport mid-morning. The overcast weather disguised the down poor it was going to unleash on us. After many buses arrived and left, we worked out how to get to CERN, taking a tram on the way. We dropped off our stuff, and jumped straight into organised tour. We had a more technical presentation followed by a 3D video of the ATLAS collider. Later we walked over the main road to access the ATLAS site. Here we got to see the control room. Our tour guide was one of the physicists. He explained to us about the different collisions, the theory/calculations behind them and how they were detected. Now the rain started to pour. We headed over to ‘the globe’, its exterior shaped by horizontal wooden members and coloured brown. Inside was fascinating – mostly because it utilised some of the latest technologies. The ceramic balls would come to life when you touched them, and operated like large touch screens. They hid and showed information with the command of your hand.”

“Our tour was as follows: first, Andriy showed us the territory of CERN as we had time, then at 15 o’clock he added us to a group with students from India en route to the magnet factory and then down to the Large Hadron Collider. [...] Next we went to Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (actually down to one of its detectors, the mighty CMS), the world’s largest accelerator of elementary particles. [...] We got the passes. [...] Here is our group, and not only ours, and an elevator behind, which takes us down to the tunnel with the detector. [...] Retina eye scan for access. Here they filmed an episode of the “Angels and Demons”. And this is the door into the holy of holies…. Wow!… The CMS detector. Actually 1 of 4 detectors: also there are Atlas, ALICE and LHCb (we did not get to the rest).”