Day 9 - Geneva

Day 9 - Geneva #genevajordan2022

The road trip adventures stopped but today is the final full day, started off with breakfast, did laundry and hung it to dry before heading out to try and catch a tour at CERN in 40 mins but you can't reserve in advance so yolo, then maybe museums and old town walks

Arrived and lined up to do the tour, can only get spots in person for the tours up to 2 hours in advance and we arrived at 10:40 and got the last spots for the 1pm tour of the cyclosynchrotron, would have slightly preferred the ATLAS control room tour for the LHC but it was full

Wastes some time going to the sphere which had a trippy little area with visualizations and various stall with explanations about near astrophysics topics like extra dimensions and dark energy

Then went to the Microcosm in the other building which had a min explanation of all the parts of the LHC and how they work and what it studies (particles), this is a cool little cloud chamber showing cosmic ray trails in real time, fun fact thousands of alien hit you every day

Oh oh, LHC about to open a portal to hell, cooling is failing this is it.

Now the tour shld be starting soon, it's for the first accelerator here at CERN which was started after WW2 to help Europe cooperate and stop brain drain in the sciences and seems to pretty successful

We had an engineer that works on one of the sub-sensors of the LHC give the tour. It started off with a VERY well produced video/light presentation about the history of CERN, attached a video showing how it used light to interact with the machinery

Shows the guts of the synchroclotron which was in use until like 1990something, it was used show the experimental evidence for the electron decay of the pion.

I'm in danger.

Honestly this kind of tour and topic and video gets me emotional a bit, humanity coming together to understand the world? 🥹

The only downside is how much time being there and waiting ended up eating up and I was much more interested in it than my wife but it's ok, i let my inner kid nerd out, even as a kid i once had a printed out ream of papers with elementary particles and their interactions

Then some crepes, pretty tasty, especially the salted caramel

Walked around the old town for a bit, very hilly and quaint in that way European cities are

Then we checked out Reformation Wall, I guess it honors protestant greats or something idk, it was a nice enough wall but the park it was in was nicer

From there we went to the Red Cross Museum, spoiler it was depressing, kind of leaves you a bit sad about humanity, the anti-CERN if you will, not as bad as when I visited Auschwitz since it has the hopeful note of "we're trying" but lots of shitty situations

It had exhibits on their humanitarian missions regarding defending human dignity, restoring family links and reducing natural risk

While it's great to see them doing these things even if they're not a perfect organization it's only because the world forces a news for it, these were some items from prisoners they made to reclaim some dignity

These were about finding ways to let families know where their loved ones were or what happened to them, it's rough

From there we walked a bit to the UN complex though we couldn't go inside, on the way we saw some guards with BIG gun's which were the first guns we'd seen but they were protecting the Russian mission so it adds up

There's a big broken chair next to it, I believe it represents how humanity is failing and losing balance because one of the 4 pillars of virtue has been destroyed. I also made that up so to me it's just a cool big chair.

Ok i looked it up and it was something depressing like I thought, it's to campaign against landmines and cluster bombs... Train station nearby kind of nice though..

Then went back to dad's, stayed to make dinner, pic + pasta and pesto again as well as packed, while wife went to a yoga class taught by dad's wife

Then sleep