Other French goodies... Visited the control room of the ATLAS cell of CERN. Spent the whole day here wandering around the exhibitions and having a 2 hour tour. I must confess that our tour guide's enthusiasm was a bit much for me at times (she's an experimental physicist) but I have no doubt that I probably sound as keen/geeky on my specialist passion too. [For those with good eyesight you'll note that the LHC was being maintained at this moment and there are no experiments being conducted].
After a whole day of quarks (I had no idea there were so many), antimatter, string theory, muons and the search for Higgs boson my head was somewhat stuffed.
I was interested to find out why the majority of the LHC is in France. Apparently in Switzerland one owns not only the surface skin on which your property is, but all the land beneath it. You can imagine that building a 27km ring 100m below ground makes for some complicated land law discussions. ATLAS is the only one of the 4 experimentation units on the LHC which is in Switzerland.
Enroute to CERN I realised that our sat nav was displaying our next road name. Isn't this just cool?
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