Kilgraston pupils visit CERN
Last week, five students were given the amazing opportunity to travel to Geneva to visit CERN, the largest particle physics lab in the world. We arrived in Geneva late on Thursday night and stayed in a hostel near the city centre until Sunday morning.
On Friday we spent the day exploring the city. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day – something we all felt we needed! The architecture was stunning, and we were amazed by the Jet d’Eau – the huge fountain in the middle of the lake, which we all got soaked by from running underneath! We also visited a science museum, which was full of fascinating old experiments. In the evening, we enjoyed a delicious meal of a traditional Swiss cheese fondue.
On Saturday we went to CERN: in the morning we had a guided tour of parts of it, including the Control Centre, with all the physics being explained to us along the way. After lunch we went to the visitor centre, which had a lot of interactive games and displays to help us learn and understand the physics behind CERN, from looking inside prototypes of parts of the collider to kicking protons at each other and creating our own stars!
Phoebe, Upper Fifth
Sixth Form visit CERN
This September, a small group of Higher and Advanced Higher Physicists lead by Kilgraston’s Head of Physics Mrs Hewett and Head of Modern Languages, Mme Depreux set off at dawn for Edinburgh airport, bound for CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), is where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (originally for sharing data between scientists) and home to the 27km circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider.
Friday was our big day at CERN. After an early start, we set off from the Old Town on Tram 18 to the CERN site on the border with France and Switzerland. After a brief but captivating visit to the Globe of Science and Innovation, we met Professor Makoto Ikeda (who suggested we call him Mac) and over three fascinating hours he took us on a tour of some of the main CERN sites, patiently guiding us through the history and the science of what happens at CERN and questioning the girls to make them think and work out the physics involved.
He talked about the early days of research in the 50s, when the calculations carried out by their first computer were checked by a Dutch maths genius as the scientists were sceptical about the new technology! The huge amount of data generated was (and amazingly still is) stored on magnetic tape.
As a young physicist working at MIT in the US, Mac used to carry these tapes back in his hand luggage! The girls asked lots of questions, some of them quite challenging, and Mac did his best to give each question due consideration. We learned that at CERN the majority of direct employees are engineers and computer scientists, whereas the physicists from universities across the world tend to come to CERN to work on specific projects. After our tour we tucked into a hearty lunch from the CERN cafeteria, sitting out on the terrace in the sunshine with many other scientists.
The girls made the most of the rest of our remaining free time, exploring the beautiful city of Geneva, including travelling on trams and the small boats called moettes and even swimming in the lake. The locals, wrapped in coats and hats, must have thought we were a hardy bunch!
We are already looking forward to returning to CERN.