Month: December 2019

Thursday was Thanksgiving, two days before we left. We had salmon, salad with pomegranate seeds along with mashed sweet potatoes and some kind of green beans. Friday was packing. All-day was packing. It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought, I guess. on Saturday we left at ten and drove to Valencia.

We arrived at the hotel at around 8:30 and checked in then had dinner. In the morning we left at roughly 8:30. we arrived at the house near Montpellier with a hot tub. We got in the hot tub. On Monday we went on a bike ride. Then mom and dad went to the store while we relaxed in the hot tub.

On Tuesday we left at 9ish. We stopped at Pont du Garde, a Roman aqueduct, a bridge used purely for bringing water into the city. It was enormous. We arrived in Geneva. On Wednesday the next day, we left to go to CERN with an LHC, a large hadron collider. It collides particles so they break apart to enter secret dimensions. It’s cool.

We left at around 8:30 and arrived at Stuttgart, where the Martinez’s are. On Friday evening we went to a Christmas market where we got a delicious cup of apple cider, called Kinderpunsch in Germany. We also got REALLY good bratwurst, a german type of sausages. I liked the boar sausages best, Ben liked the venison best and I don’t know about anyone else.

Me and Ben got more Rostbratwurst. I could not finish mine, so Ben had to finish mine. The next day we left around 1:30 and arrived at Buchenau (Eiterfeld) around 5:30-6:00.

This last week we drove 2500 km in 4 days driving, 3 resting. We started in Coin, Spain, near Malaga, and got to Buchenau, Germany. The first day was 9 hours and we got to a hotel still in Spain. The waitress was pointing out a dessert to Mom, so she used google translate, and it said it was something like ‘Cream of Polecat’. We then drove another 9ish hours to a place in the south of France that had a hot tub, an excellent stay, although the outside kitchen was massive, the inside one was tiny, and the bedding arrangement was far from ideal. We got there in the evening, slept, had a full day around there, going on a bike ride. Then we got up in the morning and left for Geneva. We got there in the evening after another 8-9 hour drive, and spent the next day at CERN, a fascinating place but Ben and Dad appreciated it more than I did, although I enjoyed and followed most of it. Next was a 10 hour drive to the Martinezes in Stuttgart, some old friends from Whidbey. we spent a full day there as well, going to the Christmas market, and seeing the Martinezes. Another 4 hours down the rode was our destination, a stay for 6 weeks.

Today, we visited CERN. Visits and guided tours are free, although guided tours book up very fast in the summer. Tickets aren’t available for a guided tour on a certain day until 15 days before, and in summer can be booked up in seconds.

First, we went to the globe, where there is an exhibit called the Universe of Particles. In the exhibition, there were various displays of things that are connected to CERN, like papers about the Higgs-Boson particle, an original proposal for the internet, and the first particle accelerator. There were also touch-screen displays showing graphics about the accelerators and a projected film about the development of particles right after the Big Bang.

Once we were finished with the Universe of Particles, it was nearly time for our tour. Nate didn’t come on it, since the minimum recommended age for the tours is 12. The three of us got our visitors badges, then waited until we were told to go into a presentation room, where the basic structure of the tour was introduced and another guide tried to fix the tech problems that come with conference or meeting room screens. He got it working, and we were given a presentation on what CERN is.

After that, the tour group was split up into two groups that did the tour in opposite orders. We started by going to look at the first particle accelerator at CERN, the Synchrocyclotron. It was constructed in 1957, right after CERN was created. The walls of the building it’s in are 5 meters thick!

After looking at a presentation about the Synchrocyclotron projected onto it, we went into the other permanent exhibit, the Microcosm. At the beginning of it, there was a map of the accelerators and an explanation of where they get the protons that they accelerate – They are extracted from hydrogen.

The next part of the permanent exhibit showed the acceleration pipe. It’s only around 60 cm in diameter. Inside, there are two pipes that are only a couple cm in diameter, which is where the proton beams go. Around that are superconductor coils that produce the magnetic field, using 18500 amps, which are surrounded by insulation.

After seeing the acceleration pipe, we looked at a cross-section of a detector. It has several detection layers – the pixel detector to detect the location of the particles coming off of the collision, a magnetic field to cause the particles to turn to detect the velocity of the particles as well, surrounded by crystal detectors that measure the energy of the particle by turning the energy into light, surrounded by muon detectors. The detectors are very large – the CMS is the smallest, and it is 15 meters high and 21 meters long.