Chamonix!

Last night was our farewell banquet. It was a fun night, the last one we'll all be together. Remember Rolf Landua and John Ellis? Yeah, Rolf cooked for us and we stood around gabbing with John. That'll never happen again either.

This morning we started out early for Chamonix, France. We planned on taking the bus, but we missed a connection by 5 minutes. We decided to rent a car, which turned out to be a good move because it was cheaper, and we could do our own thing. Chamonix is a town on Mont Blanc, and they have a couple of different excursions you can take onto the Mont. The first one we took was a series of cable cars up to the peak. Here we are waiting for our first cable car:

And this is where we ended up after our last one:

The cable cars go from 1030 meters to 3842 meters (3379 feet to 12,604 feet). The second cable car hugged the mountain all the way up; we were only a few meters away from the mountain face, and it went nearly straight up. At the top, it was tough to breathe and I was a little lightheaded. It was also COLD! We left 19 degree celsius to go up to -6 degrees (66.2 degrees F to 21 degrees). We ate lunch in a restaurant up there, and then caught the cable car back down. This is the view from the lower cable car going down.

Then we walked over to the train that carried us up a different part of Mont Blanc. Here, we could take another cable car down to a series of walkways that took us to a glacier. The cable car originally came directly to the glacier, but it has been melting away rapidly. You can see a new set of stairs each time they adjust for the lower ice mass. This picture is taken at the point where the glacier was in 2000, and you can see how far it's receeded down to the bridge.

They've drilled out a tunnel into the glacier and put lights in the walls. It was really pretty to walk around on inside, and they had small ice sculputres in it that were melting slowly. There were at least 4 entrances that we could see, but three of them were from the last couple of years....they have to redrill it because of the flow of the ice.

The train had taken us to 1933 meters (6341 feet), and I'm not sure how far we dropped down to see the glacier. Here is the train coming to take us back down.

It was about a half an hour each way, and I was so tired I took a little nap on the way back down. Once we got back to Chamonix, we walked around the town a little. It's a beautiful place!

And now, all that's left is to get ready to go home. I had a wonderful experience, I learned a lot, I met some great people that I hope to keep in touch with, and I have a list of ideas ready for this school year. Although I'm really looking forward to seeing my family, I'm going to miss being here!

Goodbye CERN!

The Last Day of CERN

Yesterday was a full day of working on our projects. We had a deadline of 5:00 unless we wanted to work late into the evening. Since security is tight to get into the CERN facility, it is much less tight inside. Many of the buildings are open 24 hours a day, although some we have to use our ID to get into. It's very safe to walk at night, and since the LHC runs 24 hours a day, there is always movement.

At 5:00, we had a suprise lecture by John Ellis, a sort of rock star physicist. You can google him to find out his many accomplishments or you can search for the Daily Show (Jon Stewart) episode he was on talking about the LHC and the possibility of it making black holes.

Following our lecture and a few last minute tweaks to our presentation we had been preparing, it was time for supper. Four of us went to an Italian restaurant and shared a pizza and meat on a mace. The mace was a medieval style mace with spikes coming out of it. Cheval (horse), veal, and beef pieces were put on the spikes and cooked. Then they brought it into our dining room, doused it with cognac, and lit it on fire.

Underneath where the mace hangs is a bowl of rice that catches all the cognac and meat drippings that you can also eat. I was really hoping to try the cheval, and I have it say it was quite tasty! All of it was very good though.

The pizza was also interesting. After it came out of the oven, they cracked an egg on the top of it and the heat of the pizza cooked the egg. Our pizza also had ham and ricotta cheese.

For dessert we had limoncello.



And then back to CERN for a nightcap.

Today each of our working groups presented their results. The Americans went out for lunch with Professor Homer Neal from the University of Michigan, the person responsible for the grant that brought us here.

Following the presentations late afternoon, the Director General of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer came to speak with us.

And with that, it's all done except the farewell barbecue tonight. It just seems like there's not enough time left, even after being here three weeks. It was so busy and it went so fast that it seems impossible that we're at the end.

Tomorrow, hopefully I'll have one last excursion out to Chamonix and up Mont Blanc. Then it's pack and hop a plane home!

July 21

It was a very full day, with a great surprise. Normally, we cannot get down into the tunnels that are 100 meters below the ground and contain the beam pipes. However, the LHC is on a technical shutdown today, and they reclassified the CMS detector so that we could go down and take a look. Some funny stories came out of the shut down, like we heard that the CMS detector kept working even when the beam was shut off because they've never had a protocol for a planned shut down. Anyway, it was incredibly good luck that this happened so that we could have the opportunity to go underground. We had to go through a double security door with an eye scanner to get in, just like in Angels and Demons (except that our eyes were still in our heads).



We went down an elevator, and it opened into the CMS (compact muon solonoid) cavern. This picture is of the beam pipe just before it enters the detector.



The detector is right behind me. There are endcaps on it, so the actual detector is much more exciting than what I could take a photo of, but it was very exciting just to be able to see it.




We then went to the control room of CMS. The man on the right is Frank Hartman, the person pretty much in charge of CMS. Of the four detectors, CMS and ATLAS are the two that are looking for the Higgs boson. They are similar in how they work, but they have some big differences which might make one more likely to find it first.




After we toured CMS, we went to LHCb. Here they use the beauty (bottom) quark to try to find out what happened to anti-matter very soon after the big bang. Back through the eye scanner and double door system....




Down in the LHCb cavern, the old Delphi detector is still housed. It was used before the LHC was built in the tunnels, back when it was LEP (large electron positron experiment). The endcaps are removed from Delphi so that we can see the detector itself.




So, there are four main detectors at the LHC: CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, and ALICE, and I have been to the control room of each of those, and into the cavern of CMS and LHCb.
We aren't done yet though! Then we went to CAST (CERN Axion Solar Telescope). They are using xrays from the sun to see if they can find any information on dark matter. I thought the quote about how Axions were named was good.

After returning to the main campus, I tried to go eat lunch with the guys from Perimeter Institute, but we got to restaurant 2 just as it was closing. They headed to the other restaurant and then on their way home, and I grabbed a Snickers and Coke and went to the training center to work on my project. At 5, I left there to come to my room to change shoes, and then it was a picnic in the Jura Mountains.

Transportation around CERN is mainly by foot, but if we need to go somewhere else on the accelerator ring, we have cars rented from CERN. Five of us shared a Fiat Panda yesterday(google it...we sort of looked like a clown car). When we go somewhere off the CERN site, then we carpool with whatever cars we can find. One of the cars we ride in is the Porsche, and it requires a short person to be able to fit into it. It's my sacrifice for the group....to always be the one that "has" to ride in the Porsche. Tonight it was up the Col de la Faucille to the bottom of a ski lift. We then had to walk a road that rose 200 m (650 ft) vertically from that point.

We were at the top of Petit Mont Rond, elevation 1533 m (5,033 ft). As we climbed, it started sprinkling and the wind picked up.

We had a makeshift picnic of fresh fruit, cheese, french breads, some meats, wine, and beer.

Soon after we started eating, it really started raining, so we stood under the ski-lift until it let up some. Then we gathered up our food and carried it all back down the mountainside. It would have been a beautiful spot if the weather had been more cooperative.

Sometimes the good thing about rain is that it cools things down a bit. It was up in the mid 90's yesterday and today, and it looks to be rainy and in the 70's tomorrow. We have working groups all day tomorrow, and since I am almost done with my project, I am going to try to sleep in a little bit. Hopefully tomorrow night a few of us will go out for meat on a mace.

International Night

I have now reached the point that I am so tired that I nearly fall asleep on my feet. I've always said I can catch up on sleep when I get home, so it's not going to slow me down....at least much.
Yesterday morning, we had a presentation by some students at Oxford University. They did pretty much the same things that you would normally see at a science fair or in some classrooms, so most of us were less than impressed. Following their presentations, my working group went to ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) where they get 6 weeks of lead ions collisions per year to do research with.

For lunch, we were going to eat at ALICE's restaurant (because you can get anything you want), but it was closed, so we had an ALICE picnic.

Then came working groups and a video conference call, followed by a quick nap and supper.

Last evening, we had our International Night. That's when each of the participants brings something unique to their home country. What that really means is snacks and hard liquor from each country, some folk dancing, and then a sing along after everyone is loosened up. Some of what we drank was a step DOWN from paint thinner. Our American contribution: Doritos and Jack Daniels.

There were 21 countries represented, with some unique foods.

Haggis....

When you mix a group of people and that much alcohol, there are certain predictible results, but it was a really fun night. After getting in at 2 am, this morning's workshop came pretty early.

Today we are working with a couple of people from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Waterloo, Ontario. I've really enjoyed what we've done so far. They have a summer institute that I may need to check into for next year!

Tonight....laundry and down time. Tomorrow is another busy day with a picnic up the Col de la Faucille, and I'm sure another late night.

I forgot in my last post to tell the story of the guy behind me in line to get into the castle gardens in Yvoire. We had to wait in line for a short time, and (as seems usual for things around here) when you pay someone gives you some information about the place and what you should expect to see. A man behind me in line kept yelling up to "get moving up there" and other comments. By the time I got up to pay, I was fumbling my money trying to hurry up, and I quickly took my money and stepped forward. He handed the cashier a $100 bill and said for 4 people. The cashier started to get his change out and give her prepared talk and he told her to "f***ing give me my money." She looked at him and said "aren't you on holiday?" He reached across the cash register, grabbed the money out of her hands, and shouted "F*** you!" It was really at odds with the serene gardens, or with decency in general.

Lunch is over....back to Quantum Reality.

Nyon and Yvoire

After a great night's sleep (since it FINALLY cooled down some, at least for a couple of days), we took off this morning for Nyon and Yvoire. Not all of the busses or boats run on Sundays, so we ended up taking a Taxi to the airport and hopping on a train to Nyon. The origins of Nyon go back to Julius Caesar. Having conquered Gaul, he decided to establish a colony, Colonia Julia Equestris, close to Lake Geneva. The city prospered for two centuries, but then started to decline after the middle of the 3rd century.

We saw the chateau, which was built on the foundations of a fortress dating from the 11th century. Having belonged to the Archbishop of Bescancon, the Lords of Prangins, the Counts of Savoy, and to the Bernese, it was altered over the years. The esplanade of Julius Caesar is a replica of that which was in the forum between 50 and 80 AD. The columns were placed in a park to commemorate Nyon's 2,000 year anniversary, and were discovered under the rue Delaflechere.

We then caught a boat from Nyon over to Yvoire, France, across Lake Geneva or Lac Leman. Yvoire is on a point out into the lake, so Count Amedee V the Great used it a military fortress from 1306 during the war between the Dauphine and Savoy. Later, when the whole region was occupied by the Bernese, the village lost it's military role and the castle was burnt, remaining roofless for 350 years. It is now known for its flowers, winning the International Trohy for Landscape and Horticulture in 2002.

The castle at Yvoire is privately owned, but the castle gardens are open for tours. There are 9 separate sections to the garden; the Alpines, the Woods, the Woven Garden, the Cloister, the Garden of Flavors, the Garden of Fragrances, the Garden of Textures, the Garden of Sight, and the Garden of Hearing.

We ate lunch in a very nice French restaurant, and then it was time to head back. This time it was boat....

to the train to downtown Geneva to the busses. And now....back at CERN and back to work. My project is due Thursday and there isn't a lot of free time left.

Two weeks has passed very quickly, and now only one left. Oh, and I'm sorry about the volume of pictures....I don't have time to go through them, so I upload nearly all of them and figure I'll have time when I get home.

Today's pictures are at

www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28495&id=100000149918038&l=b85ee3cd6a

Gruyere and Bern

We had another successful road trip today. Stefan from Romania and Deborah, Rick and I from the US rented a car and went to Gruyere and Bern. We spent most of the morning at the chateau in Gruyere. It was first built in 1115 and 19 counts occupied it at different times until the 1554. It then became home to the bailiffs and then to the prefects sent by Freiborg. In 1849, the Bovy and Balland families bought it and restored it. It was then sold back to Frieborg in 1938 and made into a museum. It is also home to the Giger museum. HR Giger did the film designs for the Aliens movies, Poltergeist, Dune, Species, among others.

We then drove to Bern, where Einstein lived in his miracle year of 1905...the year he wrote the theory of special relativity. He lived in a very small apartment building without any running water or a kitchen. The people in his apartment shared a common kitchen with some other neighboring apartments. Einstein's son Hans Albert was born when he and Mileva lived here.

We walked a couple of blocks to the Einstein museum. It was actually several museums in one large building, but Einstein got top billing. There they had several of his documents and letters from his entire life.

Bern was a very interesting town with lots of old buildings, but it was overcast and somewhat drizzly all day, so pictures don't really do it justice. We had crossed over from the French part of Switzerland to the German part between the chateau and Bern, so we were lucky that Stefan is multi-lingual.

Back tonight just in time to get the last 4 steaks at the cafeteria. I'm off to bed because I'm getting up early for a trip by taxi, train, and boat to the medieval village of Yvoire, France. I will try to post pictures from today to

www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28309&id=100000149918038&l=932b71d322