There and back again - A steemSTEM meetup at CERN

Good evening to you,

After an truly amazing weekend with the steemSTEM community on our meetup an CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, I finally managed to peruse through my own pictures. In the hope of contributing to and complementing the already existing reports (some of which you can find collected here) I would like to add some more flavour.

Geneva with the Jet d'Eau

Thursday

With the meeting inofficially beginning on thursday evening on the French side of the border, everyone including me was really busy with logistical organization, in particular finding each other in the first place. I think this emphasizes the amount of work the organizers such as @lemouth, @suesa had to invest into all of this.
Thankfully I (arriving by plane) managed to join the 2 train crews consisting of @lemouth, @grandpere, @fredrikaa, @suesa, @reggaemuffin right at the central station, from where we moved to our meeting spot in a pizza place with the help of @dber and all the other considerate drivers helping to get us around.

Friday morning

On the main day of the event, we met in the morning at CERN to take a look at its two permanent exhibitions, the "Microcosm" and the "Universe of Particles"

Lagrangian density of the Standard Model (electroweak+strong interaction) with Higgs terms and some string theory below. Of course this is only a tiny snapshot of the #sexyscience involved.
Fun fact: If you manage to add gravity in there you'll be awarded a Nobel price

The fog chamber: A particle detector you could construct yourself and set up in your living room

The bottle of Champagne commemorating the discovery of the Higgs-Boson

Cryptocurrency cold wallet Storage for collision data. Authentic 1TB hard drives with real experimental data were available for 10€ in the gift shop

Friday afternoon

After lunch, we migrated over to the French side of the border to visit our main piece of interest, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector of the Large Hadron Collider. This experiment specifically designed to pick up signatures of the muon, a heavier relative of the electron, in order to study our standard model of particle physics.
After listening to @lemouth's lecture and learning more about detector construction we ventured downwards by pressurized elevator in two separate groups. ("If you're not seing me, you're doing it wrong ...")

Some of CERN's mining operation data servers: A lot of work goes into quickly selecting physically interesting collision data on a hardware and software level

CERN's most reliable detector: A tape strip detecting inflow of refreshingly cool air

Here be dragons radiation: Access to the LHC main tunnel

What the LHC main tunnel would look like if we had been allowed in. It basically looks the same anywhere along the 27km circumference

Cross section of the CMS detector

It is worthwhile to lose a few more words on this piece as it was the main attraction of our visit:
The high energy LHC particle beam is localized within the small metal tube to a few micrometers lateral accuracy. The actual collision center is a few meters to the left along the beam trajectory and obstructed by the detector. When operational, the entire room is completely evacuated and permeated by a magnetic field of about 4 Tesla. Due to being under maintenance we got to see it in this open, partially disassembled state.

Saturday

On Saturday I tried to discover the city of Geneva by foot and went into the old town and particularly cathedral St. Pierre, before meeting up with @ana.luiza, @aurel.proorocu @fredrikaa and @howo later that day (and before some unexpectedly tense games of Perudo ^^). I have to say that Geneva is a very welcoming and historic city (albeit a little bit expensive) and definitely worth a visit.

Maccabbee chapel within the cathedral. Note the beautiful stained windows and frescoes

View over Geneva from the cathedral

The old arsenal with cannons and some mosaic walls

Geneva with the Jet d'Eau from the waterside

This guy tried to eat @ana.luzia's feet. He did not succeed

Conclusion

10/10, would meet up again.
Thank you everyone for organizing this event and being there 😊.

Image sources

• my own work