David Whitley takes a look at CERN, the headline-grabbing scientific complex on the outskirts of Geneva.
Bond film?
It’s not often that you can get off a bus and walk straight into the end of a Bond film, but the terminus for the number 56 looks like evil henchman central. A big rust-coloured sphere dominates the foreground, while the mountains, sea of concrete buildings and scurrying scientific types behind the security barriers vie for attention in the background.
The slightly sinister looking complex is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – universally known as CERN (they changed the name, but kept the old acronym). It it seems a bit like the sort of place where a thriller would be set, that’s because it is. Before he wrote the Da Vinci Code and became ridiculously rich and famous as a result, Dan Brown penned Angels and Demons.
Angels and Demons
The book kicks off at CERN, where a physicist is found murdered and a gram of potentially deadly antimatter is stolen by a shadowy secret society.
The film of the book, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, is due for release on May 14th. A significant chunk of the movie was shot on location at CERN, and the advance notice needed to book onto a tour of the enormous facility is likely to increase as a result. Visitors are already lucky if they get on one booking a month in advance.
Large Hadron Collider
CERN works on a vast range of projects, but the most famous in recent times is the Large Hadron Collider. Large is something of an understatement – it’s the biggest machine in the world by some distance. The idea behind it is to smash sub-atomic particles together at such a force that enough energy is released to replicate conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
The scientists want to find what ties nature’s fundamental forces together, and to do that, they have to fire particles round and round a tunnel network that is 27km in diameter, 100m underground and crosses over the French border.
Along with the tunnels are a series of chambers featuring colossal detectors – the ATLAS detector fills out a cavern that is 35m wide, 55m long and 40m high, for example. The whole thing has taken billions in funding, near superhuman feats of mechanical engineering and the most advanced system of cryogenics on the planet to prevent overheating. All this, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll find what they’re looking for.
It’s not possible to visit the Large Hadron Collider itself, but there is a replica section of it inside the visitor’s centre. It looks like the sort of place where you’d find a cornered Sigourney Weaver in one of the Alien films.
Microcosm exhibition
The Microcosm exhibition inside the visitor’s centre is tiny in comparison to the behemoth beneath it, but it’s still fairly huge. It’s one of those places that attempts to make science fun, explaining how we’re made up of particles that have been around for billions of years, and attempting to present quarks, protons and electrons in layman’s terms.
There are a lot of screens to look at, buttons to press and levers to yank, yet it all seems ironically low tech and fetchingly dated. Imagine being back in school and watching a science programme presented by a man with a beard and sandals or a stout, frumpy woman sporting comically oversized geek glasses – that’s the vibe.
The interactivity makes it work, although many of the concepts will fly right over the heads of most visitors.
CERN’s projects
Far more intriguing are the areas that concentrate on the work of CERN. Nuclear physics may seem like the detached realm of eggheads, where people bandy about numbers and equations with no practical use, but the click-through presentations turn this perception on its head.
Many cutting edge medical treatments – particularly in the field of cancer – have their foundations in CERN’s discoveries. Machines and tools used for research have been found to have practical, medical uses, and a whole host of new innovations will work their way into hospitals over the next ten years.
With all the machinery and data being created, huge advances in computing have also been needed. Computing technology has been developed as a by-product, and has been utilised by outsiders. The most famous of CERN’s innovations has unquestionably changed the world, and the idea for it was submitted 20 years ago.
The invention of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee’s boss called his proposal “vague but exciting”. By 1991, the proposal had become reality. The world’s first web page was created, and what would morph into the World Wide Web was born. Those of a geekier disposition will be delighted to know that the world’s first web server is on display at Microcosm.
Even more fascinating is CERN’s current computing project. The scientists are aiming to take things one step further, essentially turning every computer in the world into one giant supercomputer with a power and storage capacity several magnitudes higher than any current network can manage.
The Grid
Called The Grid, the project is still in development, but in a few years time, we could all be a part of it. If it happens, expect to be able to download DVDs in a second and store unlimited numbers of giant files without batting an eyelid. The clickable computer displays at Microcosm explain how it would work, and the problems it faces.
The lines between science-fiction and reality blur somewhat at CERN, and that’s probably why Dan Brown picked it in the first place. Angels and Demons may largely be inventive nonsense, but CERN scientists have managed to create antimatter (they were the first to ever do so in 1995). The rest may be somewhat far-fetched, but you can never rule anything out at a place that changes the future and recreates the beginning of time.
Trip Notes
From Geneva’s Contravin station, get tram number 14 or 16 to Avanchet, then get the number 56 bus which terminates at CERN. Tours must be booked well in advance, but Microcosm is free to enter without calling ahead.
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