The Kimberley School Newsletter October 2014 | Page 2

GENEVA SCIENCE TRIP

Last Thursday, a group of our Year
12 and 13 physics students went
to Geneva to visit CERN and the
LHC, as part of a joint trip with
Trinity School and in partnership
with The Ogden Trust. On the
Thursday, we departed for Trinity at lunch time and spent most
of the afternoon travelling down to
Luton to fly out to Geneva in the
evening. Once we arrived, after a
thankfully smooth, uninterrupted
flight, we headed to the youth
hostel to unpack and get ready
for the day ahead of us on Friday.
After an early breakfast on Friday
morning at 8am (7am our time!), we
headed out for a short walk around
Geneva where we saw Lake Geneva
and Saint Pierre’s Cathedral, which
is situated on a hill overlooking most
of the city. There was a long walk up
a tight flight of spiral stairs that led
up into the spire, where there was an
amazing, if a bit windy, view of the city
below. We were then allowed some
free time to shop and look around for
ourselves. During this time, we came
across some outrageously expensive
items including pens and watches that
cost more than 10,000 Swiss francs
and a huge floral clock that actually
kept time!

In the afternoon, we took the train
out to the CERN main building to eat
a swift lunch and then to attend a
lecture about the purposes and goals
of CERN. We were told how CERN
and the LHC are helping to drive
forward the technology in particle
detecting and how some of these
technologies are then made available

to the public. We were told about
how the internet was developed for
experiments taking place at CERN
to allow the data to pass around the
world to all the member states. The
lecture also taught us about some of
the key questions CERN has set out
to try and answer such as; why do
particles have mass? And why isn’t
there an equal amount of matter and
antimatter? After this, we were taken on a short coach journey crossing
the French border to visit the LHCb
experiment where we actually went
down underground to see the
detector. It was amazing to see how
large the detector was, considering
how impossibly small the things it
is trying to detect are. We were also
taken up close to an old decommissioned detector that was used
as part of the old LEP ring the LHC
replaced, but was too big to
excavate so they just rolled it out
of the way to make room. We were
actually allowed to touch and see the
inner workings. Before being taken
down to the detector, we were given
a talk about how each individual part
of the detector worked and what they
told us about the properties of the
particles. We were also taken to see
the control room for the detector,
which was full of countless monitors.
That night, we went to a fondue
restaurant serving us trays of meat
to cook in a hot broth in the middle of
the table. The meal was accompanied
by music being played by a man with a
guitar and harmonica who would leave
after every song, only to return, to the
amusement of everyone eating.

On the Friday, we headed back to
CERN to visit the Microcosm and
Universe of Particles exhibitions. The
Universe of Particles consisted of a
large dome shaped room with LCD
displays on the walls to make it look
like we were m