To describe Geneva using 3 words, i would have to say: cold, expensive, but beautiful. (And as a side note, if you don't understand the title, don't try to it's nothing more than a joke from the trip.) However with a little bit of student living it is very easy to get by on a small budget, as i found out having only such a budget. Nevertheless a pizza and a litre of iced tea for 10CHF tastes just as good as any restaurant meal, although worrying since it came from a shop inbetween a kebab store and a corner shop and the iced tea could not be found anywhere else.
So don't be put off about going to Geneva because bargains can be found (well bargains for Switzerland, normal price for the UK), and it truly is a beautiful place and having a wander round Geneva with no sense of direction but instead a "that looks interesting, let's walk down there" attitude worked out very well with something to be found round every corner, and it's quite hard to get lost since a simple walk downhill to the lake and you've found your bearings once again. And if you just stay by the lake then you'll still be in for some for great views especially around sunset, sitting at the end of the walkway in the middle of the lake.
Enough about Geneva though, since the whole purpose of the trip was to see CERN. For those of you who don't enjoy science then you probably won't understand how exciting it is for one of us science lovers to visit CERN, but believe me it was amazingly awesome. Although for me it wasn't the particle colliders that excited me most but Tim Berners-Lee's computer, which was the original world wide web server, and without i probably wouldn't be writing this now.
But i understand that most people would be more impressed with the actual purpose of CERN which is of course to collide particles in order to understand the fundamental physics of the universe, but it's nice to think that during this quest, one of the most important inventions of the last century occurred and because it was invented at CERN it was free for the public to use, perhaps making it what it is today. Now most people will know all about the LHC (large hadron collider) but infact there are 6 accelerators and a decelerator, luckily for me as the LHC and many of the other accelerators are currently out of bound, so we were only allowed to see 2 of them (the decelerator and a linear accelerator).
The great thing was that also whilst we were there they were actually accelerating lead ions, although unlike most people think we didn't actually see any particles colliding, just some graphs showing the energy levels of the ions (so not that exciting actually). Though they did get the particles up to about 99.9% of the speed of light, so of course i started to think about the question of how much would a lead ion at that speed hurt? I tried using some equations to find out the force of such particles but they got reasonably complicated and to be honest the only real way to find out is through experimentation, so i'll contact CERN to book a slot with the accelerators, now i just any volunteers so please respond if you want to take part.
All in all then the trip was amazing, and a must do for any fellow geeks. You never know you could be there when they discover the higgs boson, imagine how amazing that would be. Hopefully i'll be able to go back some day as well, maybe as a visit or perhaps to work (doubt it'll be to do with the previous mentioned experiment though).
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