Geek Day

Today's lesson: when people and countries put aside politics and war, when the truly cooperate in an open, sharing, trusting environment, they can achieve amazing things. I saw this in the Antarctic Peninsula and the lesson was revised at CERN today :) 

My last Geek Day was my visit to the Bodleian Library where I soaked up a huge amount of information in a short time. Today's information soaking time was rather longer. I spent the best part of the day at CERN learning about the Large Hadron Collider and the experiments. If you get a chance to go there, I recommend it. The free exhibition, Microcosm, clearly explains a huge amount about life, the universe and everything. The guided tour was great - didn't get to visit the collider itself but saw one of the control rooms, and saw CERN's first collider. 

This photo shows the building that sits on top of the ATLAS experiment and houses its control room. ATLAS is a system that collects the data as the millions of collisions occur. (CERN has four such experiments running at different places on the loop.) The murals show what is going on in ATLAS. As I listened to our guide, and read panels and watched videos in Microcosm, I found myself again impressed by what humans can, and have, achieved.