Our last full day in Geneva was spent walking the old city (again) and visiting the Maison Tavel (Tavel House), the oldest house in Geneva. Along the way was passed through the park adjacent to the University of Geneva containing many distractions for wayward students.
The Queen making her moveAttractive view – Geneva
Maison Tavel was built in the 12th century by the Maison family. In 1334, the house was reconstructed following a devastating fire. In 1963, the house was purchased by the city of Geneva and converted into a museum.
A detailed 3D model takes up the greater part of the Maison Tavel attic. Architect Auguste Magnin spent 18 years creating this imposing relief map of Geneva before the destruction of its fortifications in 1850 and subsequent transformation into the modern city we see today. The model is constructed entirely of metal. The houses and fortifications are in zinc, and the roofs in copper. Composed of 86 sections, it covers a surface area of 32 m². The “Magnin Relief Map” was presented for the first time at the 1896 National Exhibition in Geneva.
Lilliputian view – Geneva 1850
St. Peter’s Cathedral was build between 1160 and 1252. Alas, the interior of the Cathedral was demolished in 1535, when Geneva’s residents accepted the Reformation and destroyed all the altars, statues and most of the paintings in a rage inspired by John Calvin (a resident of Geneva at the time). The Cathedral superstructure and spire escaped undamaged though.
Spire of St. Peter’s Cathedral – Geneva
We were blessed with the very best of weather during our visit to Geneva and despite it being our longest stop (of seven nights), there remained much to do as we departed for our next location in Switzerland.
Lunch on our balcony – GenevaMore attractive views – Geneva
We depart Geneva for Bern, Switzerland’s capital, expecting more good weather and places to explore.
Travelling network setup
I thought it may be interesting for our dear readers to view the travelling network setup I have been using on this trip.
Traveltime – travelling setup
The four way power strip provides power to items 4, 5, 6 and 7.
1. Travel wireless router with switch programmed VPN tunnel
2. 1TB wireless hard disk with SD card reader
3. Water-resistant bluetooth speaker
4. Canon camera battery charger
5. Google Chromecast USB power supply
6. Four port USB power supply (4 x 1A)
7. Four port USB power supply (2 x 2.4A [iPads] & 2 x 1A [iPhones])
8. Micro-USB leads for charging other portable bluetooth devices
Arriving at new accommodation, these items are deployed in a suitable location near the existing network router and connected using a network cable (preferably) or wireless (otherwise).
Our portable devices (2 x iPhones, 2 x iPads, 1 x Dell laptop, 1 x Google Chromecast, 1 x 1TB wireless hard disk and 1 x Canon camera) are connected to a private wireless network provided by item 1 completely independent and isolated from any external networks.
I have configured item 1 to connect to our home in East Maitland via an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) tunnel routing all traffic such that it appears we are in Australia. This allows us to access internet content that may be otherwise blocked from Australia. This is the case for all ABC iView content and allows us to watch the ABC news, 7:30 Report or Four Corners, for example. This function is controlled via a switch on the side of item 1 and is turned on as required.
The Google Chromecast is plugged into the TV and allows us to stream content to the TV rather than view it on the iPhone, iPad or the Dell laptop. This works for all iView, Netflix, YouTube and other supported services.
The water-resistant bluetooth speaker (item 3) allows me to listen to ABC AM, PM and a number of favourite ABC and BBC podcasts while I’m in the bathroom (and anywhere else within our accommodation for that matter). It has great bass response and also makes my favourite tunes sound great even when I’m not in the shower. 🙂
It only takes a few minutes to setup this system on arrival and has proven to provide a secure and reliable internet connection for all our devices.
When I was in year nine at high school, I heard a radio programme on the ABC which deeply affected me. From the BBC Horizon series of science and technology programmes, it was called “The Hunting of the Quark” and was released in May 1974. The programme provided an overview of the current state of knowledge and research into particle physics. The description of the science and scale of engineering being undertaken at CERN in Europe in the pursuit of the elusive fundamental particles of nature filled me with a sense of awe and wonder that has never left me.
Fast forward some forty five years and I am still awe struck at the scale of the work undertaken at CERN and I am so happy to have been able to visit the largest science laboratory on the planet – even if only as a humble visitor.
At an intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951, the first resolution concerning the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research (in French, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) was adopted. CERN is now generally referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics – but the acronym has long since stuck.
Our visit
CERN’s visitor centre is only a short tram ride north-west of the centre of Geneva and about 200 metres from the French border. Much of CERN’s equipment is distributed between Switzerland and France. The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is the second-largest machine in CERN’s accelerator complex with a circumference of 7 km. It is perfectly bisected by the Swiss-French border running as a diagonal across the central axis of the machine causing the particles in the two counter-rotating beams travelling at near the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s) to cross the border about 100,000 times every second. There are no hard borders at CERN for sub-atomic particles!
2004 was the 50th anniversary of CERN and to mark the occasion, the Universe of Particles permanent exhibition was opened along with a striking piece of art in the form of a metal spiral (perhaps depicting the path of a decaying particle). In the picture below the large brown dome contains the Universe of Particles – which unfortunately was closed for maintenance for the exact duration of our stay in Geneva. 🙁
Universe of Particles – CERN
On one side of the metal strip is a list of famous scientists, mathematicians and “natural philosophers” along with a brief description of their principal contribution to knowledge. On the other side is a series of equations, drawings and symbols starting with Euclidean geometry and finishing with the Standard Model Lagrangian which represents our current best understanding of how the universe, and all it contains, functions.
Leibnitz’ differential calculus and Newton’s Universal Law of GravitationEinstein’s mass energy equation and Planck’s constant
In the basement of the visitor centre is another permanent exhibition that can be viewed without having to be on a guided tour. Called Microcosm, it provides an extensive and interactive presentation of the background into what CERN is looking for, how it goes about it and the machines it has designed and constructed to do it.
Microcosm – cutaway model of LHC particle beam guidance hardwareMicrocosm – scale model of ATLAS detector hardware
Associated with Microcosm, there is an outside garden containing decommissioned hardware. The image below shows one of the acceleration cavities from the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider.
One of 288 LEP superconducting acceleration cavities
With its 27 km circumference, the LEP collider was – and still is – the largest electron-positron accelerator ever built. The excavation of the LEP tunnel was Europe’s largest civil engineering project prior to the Channel Tunnel. Three tunnel-boring machines started excavating the tunnel in February 1985 and the ring was completed three years later.
LEP was commissioned in July 1989 and the first beam circulated in the collider on 14 July. In 1995 LEP was upgraded for a second operation phase before it was finally closed down on 2 November 2000 to make way for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Commissioned on 10 September 2008, the LHC exists to provide high energy particles for experiments, located at specific locations on the circumference of the LHC ring. ATLAS and CMS are the largest experiments.
ATLAS: AToroidal LHC Apparatus
CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid
MoEDAL: Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC
ALICE: ALarge Ion Collider Experiment
LHCb: LHC-beauty
LHCf: LHC-forward
ATLAS
Beams of particles from the LHC collide at the centre of the ATLAS detector making collision debris in the form of new particles, which fly out from the collision point in all directions. Six different detecting subsystems arranged in layers around the collision point, record the paths, momentum, and energy of the particles, allowing them to be individually identified. A huge magnet system bends the paths of charged particles so that their momenta can be measured.
The interactions in the ATLAS detectors create an enormous flow of data. To digest the data, ATLAS uses an advanced “trigger” system to tell the detector which events to record and which to ignore. Complex data-acquisition and computing systems are then used to analyse the collision events recorded. At 46 m long, 25 m high and 25 m wide, the 7000-tonne ATLAS detector is the largest volume particle detector ever constructed. It sits in a cavern 100 m below ground near the main CERN site. The following image shows the control room and maintenance buildings associated with the ATLAS experiment.
ATLAS experiment buildings
The guided tour
Each of our guided tours lasted two hours, in which we were able to visit two sites within walking distance of the visitors centre; CERN’s first particle accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron and the ATLAS experiment buildings.
CERN’s first particle accelerator – The Synchrocyclotron
The Synchrocyclotron (SC) built in 1957, was CERN’s first accelerator. It provided beams for CERN’s first experiments in particle and nuclear physics. In 1964, this machine started to concentrate on nuclear physics alone, leaving particle physics to the newer and much more powerful Proton Synchrotron (PS).
The SC became a remarkably long-lived machine. In 1967, it started supplying beams for a dedicated unstable-ion facility called ISOLDE, which carries out research ranging from pure nuclear physics to astrophysics and medical physics. In 1990, ISOLDE was transferred to a different accelerator, and the SC was closed down after 33 years of service. The building housing the SC has been transformed using clever audio-visual presentations showing the history of CERN and the basic operation of the SC with animated images superimposed over the machine.
On our first tour (Wednesday), we were fortunate to have a very enthusiastic theoretical physicist from China as our guide. As one of more than 10,000 scientists and technicians who work at CERN, he was very happy to patiently answer the most inane of questions and spoke with great excitement about the possibility of a new accelerator with a proposed circumference of 100 km. [Increasing the size of the accelerator ring reduces the energy losses involved in making the beams run around the ring – leaving more available when the particles are subsequently smashed together.]
On our second tour (Thursday), our guide, of Russian heritage, was less informative and somewhat dismissive about the likelihood of the 100 km accelerator ever being constructed.
The Higgs boson
On 4 July 2012, Daniel and I were sitting in front of the computer in my study watching a live internet streaming presentation from CERN during which both the ATLAS and CMS experimental teams announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 125 GeV (Giga-electron volts; 125,000,000,000 eV; a measure of mass used in particle physics). This particle was consistent with that of the Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model based on the work of three therotical physisists during the 1970s. Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs proposed a mechanism that is now called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism and which predicts particles having properties observed during the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
On 8 October 2013, the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs * “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. *Robert Brout passed away on 3 May 2011.
CERN and the World Wide Web
The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on a computer belonging to Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN. Developed as a collaborative tool to rapidly disseminate information within CERN, the underlying software and communication protocols that enable the operation of the WWW was subsequently given away to the public domain. The fact you can read this blog on a browser on your computer or smartphone is due to the brilliance of Berners-Lee and his fellow CERN scientists layered on top of the underlying Internet network of distributed computing resources.
Saying goodbye to CERN
I’m pleased to say that no leptons, fermions, bosons, quarks or any other, as yet undiscovered, elemental particles were harmed during our visit to CERN as the LHC is shutdown for a two year period while its components are enhanced to produce beams with an energy of 7 TeV (Tera-electron volts; 7,000,000,000,000 eV). The LHC is scheduled to be back on line sometime during 2020.
With so much fascinating stuff to see and information to absorb it was hard to finally climb aboard the tram and head back into Geneva on Thursday afternoon.
Chris also enjoyed our visit to CERN
I’d like to say a special thank you to my dearest Christine for engaging patiently with me for two whole days at CERN. She gets the quark charm award; I expect I’m in line for the quark strange award, and you, dear reader, get the quark top award for making it all the way to the end of this post. 🙂
When planning our itinerary, Chris allocated a generous seven days to Geneva – this turned out to be a wise decision as there is much to do and see here.
Having recovered our bags from the bus upon our arrival from Annecy, and in brilliant sunshine, we set forth in search of a bank to exchange Australian dollars for Swiss Francs. Our Qantas Travel Money debit cards don’t support Swiss Francs and so it had been my plan to carry Australian dollars to Switzerland and exchange them there, bypassing intermediate exchange rates. Switzerland is a beautiful but comparatively expensive place to visit.
Following a quick review of the metro system, we jumped aboard a tram, making our way to accommodation just outside the perimeter of the old city.
Dumping our bags, we set off to make the most of the perfect afternoon weather. At the edge of Lake Geneva, we enjoyed views of the spectacular water fountain that is a popular tourist attraction and the tallest fountain in the world.
Jet d’Eau Fountain – Geneva
In 1886, a water fountain was created to control the release of excess pressure from a local hydraulic plant. Shortly thereafter, it became a recognisable symbol of the city and was relocated to a more central location on the southern shoreline and improved with a set of reliable water pumps.
Rainbows on Lake Geneva
Reaching a height of over 140 metres and with more than four tonnes of water suspended, the resulting water sprays are responsible for many attractive rainbows.
The following day (Sunday), we visited the Geneva Museum of Art and History investing a full day in viewing fine arts and antiquities and reprising Chris’ “Best painting in the room” competition. I must be learning something as I only lost by 37 to 15.
Summer – Pierre-Auguste Renoir
As most European museums are closed on Mondays, we rose early, making our way to the United Nations Office in Geneva (UNOG) building to hopefully queue for a guided tour. Thankfully, Malcolm Turnbull had quashed Kevin Rudd’s 2016 bid to replace Ban Ki-Moon as Secretary-General and thus we were granted admittance once our passports were scanned and Chris’ picture taken as evidence of our visit.
United Nations 1
Geneva’s United Nations buildings were initially constructed to house the League of Nations, founded on 10 January 1920 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War.
United Nations 2
It was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Unfortunately, it failed to prevent what was to became the Second World War and ceased operations on 20 April, 1946.
United Nations 3
The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, when the Charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and by a majority of other signatories (Australia ratified the charter on 1 November 1945).
United Nations 4
Our guided tour covered the Palais des Nations, the UNOG which serves as the representative office of the Secretary-General at Geneva. A focal point for multilateral diplomacy, UNOG services more than 8,000 meetings every year, making it one of the busiest conference centres in the world. With more than 1,600 staff, it is the biggest duty station outside of the United Nations headquarters in New York.
After our visit to the UNOG, we wandered through the nearby botanical gardens before enjoying a pleasant lunch in the cafe among the palm fronds.
With our first visit to CERN confirmed for Wednesday; on Tuesday we took the train for a day trip to Lausanne – a mere 40 minutes away and located at the northern arc of Lake Geneva.
Alighting from Lausanne railway station into a biting wind that thankfully did not reflect the balance of the day’s weather, we headed downhill towards the lake’s shoreline.
Attractive view – Lausanne
Along the way we found a lookout providing beautiful views of Lausanne and Lake Geneva.
Reaching the lake’s edge we enjoyed walking through expansive parkland clearly popular during the warmer months. Along the way we discovered where Easter bunny chocolate moulds are created.
Easter bunny models – Lausanne
Heading back towards the centre of town, we wandered through the marina providing magnificent views across the lake.
Lausanne marina
Lausanne’s waterfront provides many opportunities for the rich-bastard class to parade their wealth.
Lausanne waterfront 1
We scurried by, not wanting to draw attention to our meagre means and convict heritage.
Lausanne waterfront 2
Lausanne happens to be the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). I now understand why Kevin Gosper AO, John Coates AC and James Tomkins OAM would seek to represent Australia on the IOC given the salubrious digs that Lausanne presents.
Lausanne has been home to the IOC for 100 years and in 1993, the IOC founded an official museum on the shoreline of Lake Geneva. In 2013, The Olympic Museum was completely renovated and updated with many interactive audio-visual facilities. Covering three floors, the exhibition presents the origin of the games, the competitions and the athletic spirit through over 150 screens and 1500 objects: The Olympic torches and medals of all The Olympic games, as well as the equipment from many famous athletes.
The Olympic Museum – Lausanne
It was wonderful to view footage of Cathy Freeman lighting the Sydney 2000 Olympic cauldron and then winning the Women’s 400 metre final. And Steven Bradbury’s gold medal at Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics Short Track Speed Skating was a must see.
We returned to Geneva, tired from another long day and looking forward to our visit to CERN.
