As I am sure you have seen in oh... I don't know... 21 other posts... This past Friday, the steemSTEM project had it's very first meetup in Geneva Switzerland at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire otherwise known as CERN. It was here that the group of 22 participants worshiped satan... (just kidding). It was at CERN that the group of us descended the depths into the Large Hadron Colider, and witnessed first hand one of the marvels of modern human engineering, the Compact Muon Solenoid detector.
My Arrival/First Dinner
I left Boston Massachusetts USA on wednesday night (late by about 1 hour due to inclement weather) traveling to Munich Germany where I would meet up with my significant other and she and I would complete our travels together on a separate flight into Geneva. Well...travel and me don't exactly mesh well, and despite my best efforts running through the Munich airport, I missed that first connecting flight by about 2 minutes (not that the plane didn't sit on the runway for another 30 minutes... grrrrrr). Anyway I caught the next flight to Geneva a few hours later. If you look carefully in the picture to the left you can see some of the (I believe...) alps peaking over the clouds during my descent into Geneva!
I landed, located my bored girlfriend patiently waiting at the airport, picked up our rental car and headed to our hotel room for a quick nap before heading off to meet some of the other steemSTEMians for dinner at a restaurant called Le Casanova for some Italian food, some wine and some conversation. On my way I met up with @lemouth and @grandpere (who were too many to fit in @dber s car) and we shuttled as a group off to the restaurant. When we arrived the majority of the rest of the group were already seated and the party started.
@suesa distributed some name tags to everyone (it's really hard to remember everyone's name and also steemit username).
As you can see from the picture above to the right, the food at the table was quickly eaten, wine drunk, and merriment had by the group. We all departed off to get some sleep before the next days activities.
Globe of Science/Indian Foods
We all reconvened at the Globe of Science and Innovation or as many brainless non steemSTEM steemian's call it, the flat plane of science and innovation :p
This portion of CERN's general exhibit for people to attend, had a nice movie, as well as some interesting objects on display. For instance it showed you the size of the canister of hydrogen nuclei (protons) used to create the proton beam that gets collided by the LHC.
We continued our tour of CERN led by @lemouth at Microcosm where we learned more about the history of accomplishments at CERN and departed for lunch at an Indian restaurant near the entrance to the CMS detector portion of the Large Hadron Colider.
CMS
Upon reaching the CMS and being educated by both @lemouth, who gave us a nice lecture on the basics of particle physics as well as Freya one of the particle physicists also working at CERN. We rode an elevator down to where particles colide. The image to the left should give you an idea of just how far we went down. Way at the top of that shaft, that's ground level. You can also see that running along that shaft are some christmas lights which according to our tour guide, serve no real purpose other than to indicate what direction the data from the LHC goes... which apparently is ... up. :D
We walked through the corridors, through the bitcoin miners, past the cables, around the radiation sources and finally arrived at our ultimate destination, the CMS detector itself. Boy, was it ever a sight to see... and to stand near! I am not sure why I look so grumpy in this photo, I can assure you I look pretty cheery in the various selfies that my girlfriend and I took together that I am not going to share with you all :p
This was the end of our tour and the grand delivery of the experience that @lemouth promised and delivered to all the members who showed up. It's one that I will certainly not forget!
After The Meetup Exploration of Geneva
The next day my girlfriend and I continued our exploration of Geneva taking in the various sights seeing things like.. a really big jet of water. (yes people in Geneva are so rich they have nothing better to do with their money then to just shoot water high into the air from their lake).
I also visited some old churches, botanical gardens with very few flowers (its winter!) where I learned of a fruit called "cheese fruit", and the Reformation Wall. My flights departed the next morning and after about 12 more hours of travel I returned to the good ole USA and work on Monday morning.
Other Things I Did
- Ate A $27 hamburger (food on Geneva is really expensive)
- Drank a $7 bottle of sparkling water (it wasn't even a big bottle!)
- Ate a cup of denmark
- Got lost more than once
- Ran out of battery in my cell phone from using the GPS too much to get me out of being lost
Here's to @steemstem, Steemit, and making peoples dreams become a reality.
I wonder what we will cook up for next year :)