July 8

It has been a hot one here today! It's only around 90 degrees, but I realize how much I am spoiled. There is only air conditioning in a few places here, and even then, it's not at a very low temperature. Most Europeans don't have air conditioning and some in the group have asked the air to be turned off in one of our meeting rooms because they are cold. We were told today that it is now illegal to install air conditioning in Geneva. Add to that this place is a concrete jungle and that fans are a scarcity as well, and then put 40 of us in a room for a lecture, and it does get warm. It is supposed to be this warm until Sunday and then we might get a little bit of a break.

We had another lecture this morning on particle physics, our last in this series. Next week's lectures are on Cosmology and Anti-matter. We also had a question and answer session which was interesting. Among the answers....the annual budget of CERN is around $1billion, although it is $1.1 billion this year to pay back some they borrowed. The electric bill annually is $60 million. They employ around 2250 full time employees, of which 600 are physicists. There are annually 10,000 users (people who are not employed by CERN but are here for research). Of the scientists, only 18.4% are women. They do not give any preference for women in hiring, but they said that his percentage was about the same as the percentage of applicants who are female which they say proves they don't discriminate. It's been said many times here that the big discoveries come from young people, 25 years old or less.

Late afternoon we built cloud chambers and detected muons that way. I planned on building one this school year, but the way they had us do it today seemed much easier than my instructions I originally was going to use. The picture above is a couple of my lab partners...Lucia from Slovakia and Isabelle from Portugal. This picture is the notes from that session, delivered in a very low-tech fashion....tableau noir.

I had planned on going into Geneva for the evening since shops are open late on Thursdays, but the people that I was going with all were too tired after our day. I had a cold plate supper, and after this note, I will probably go sit on the patio and have my regular evening chocolate and drink.

I have heard that on the Angels and Demons DVD, there is an extra 15 minutes on CERN. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I would like to see the parts filmed at CERN, and certainly that extra section. I was surprised to see the next Dan Brown book in the gift store here, considering that the science in Angels and Demons is pretty much bunk.

Tomorrow we go to the LHC control room....should be a very interesting day.