We certainly left the best for last!!!! The reason Shawn chose Switzerland for his trip was to visit CERN. CERN is the European organization for Nuclear Research, which houses the world’s largest particle accelerator. If you wish to tour CERN you need to apply well in advance of coming, I booked in January and I was still holding my breath that we would get in during our two weeks. My advice would be to book the CERN tour before the airline tickets are bought. We arrived early to register and look around. The tour is over two hours long and that doesn’t include the globe and the microcosm exhibit, and of course the gift store. As CERN is currently in operation, the tour doesn’t include traveling underground to see the inner workings, however we were able to see two fabulous video presentations, one in 3d, plus a guided tour which included a stop at the control center for the Atlas experiment. OMG it was amazing, the sheer enormity of the whole center is mind blowing. The thought that under your feet in a 27 km tube, where two beams of light are being sent at 99.999999999999% of the speed of light to collide, so that scientists can study the resulting data. Out of 1 billion proton collisions a second, they only study 200 “interesting” collisions from any one second. Out of many interesting facts, CERN also developed the world wide web in 1989ish. As you can see, I was more than a little impressed and “penny” actually learned a lot.
