Visit to CERN

It's been over a week since I've visited the blogosphere to update you on my life here in Switzerland. For those who have made it this far in my Geneva Journal, I thank you for your loyalty and patience, and I apologize for the delay. I assure you that the recent dearth of posts has not been due to a lack of adventures to report, but rather the opposite. In fact, last Tuesday, I took tourism to a whole new level, literally. Altitude: 100 meters underground. Setting: the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is situated on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is the largest physics experiment ever built, spanning 28 kilometers in diameter beneath two countries. It has made appearances in this past year's news, it was featured in the movie "Angels and Demons," and it has sometimes preceded the phrase "will cause millions of tiny black holes that could unleash an armageddon." The CMS at CERN, in particular, is one of the most impressive of the LHC experiments. The solenoid weighs twice as much as the Eiffel Tower. The heaviest piece breaks the scale at 2000 tons and took 12 hours to lower 100 meters into the ground with 10 centimeters of clearance between it and the surrounding shaft. The CMS superconducting magnet alone is 6 meters in diameter, has to be cooled to within a couple degrees of absolute zero, and generates a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than that of the earth. The energy stored in the magnet could melt 18 tons of gold and the radiation generated by the resultant particle beam takes a week to diminish.

What exactly does the CMS do? It accelerates protons and heavy ions to near light-speed and collides them at unprecedented energies. A billion of these proton-proton interactions occur every second as the CMS detector snaps 40 million pictures in the same time interval. In essence, the CMS creates localized conditions similar to those that existed the instant after the Big Bang in order to look for new particles and phenomena and to better understand why the world is the way it is.

So what brought me to CERN on what would have otherwise been an ordinary Tuesday night? It turns out that a friend of the Imbrocks and a fellow member of the weekly Bible study for twenty- and thirty-year-olds works at CERN and was kind enough to arrange a free private tour for the Crossroads Church community, including myself and Amy. Considering this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that I was already living, working, and sleeping practically right above the world's biggest science fair project, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see it firsthand.

Control room on the ground level. Don't press the wrong button...


Someone call backup. We're gonna have to tighten our security...

One hundred meters underground.

Thick retractable metal walls (orange) shield the radiation.

The superconducting magnet.

From sunsets to sub-atomic particles: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." (Romans 1:20)