eLearning Collaborative

Today was almost completely booked! This morning we
started off the day by heading to one of the sites along the acceleration part
of the LHC. This is basically an extremely long tunnel that holds the pathway
along which the particles will travel, and the magnets that will steer them.
The section that we visited did not have any magnets installed, so we could
still see the two beam pipes running down the tunnel which was really neat!

    After we got back from the LHC, we had lunch, worked on
our video (which is turning out to be way more of a pain than we originally
expected...), and went to this museum at the CERN visitor center, which was
pretty amusing for a bit. Then we all gathered at the front of this visitor
center building to go tour ATLAS!

    The ATLAS can be explained simply as immense. It was by
far the biggest piece of machinery I have ever seen in my life, and would even
go as far as saying that there is no machine in the world as large and compact
as this! We only got a limited tour of the facility since it was the middle of
'Open Day' and they were running people in and out as fast as they could, but
we still at least got to see it in all its majesty and wonder at its size and
complexity.

    ATLAS basically has the same purpose as CMS, but they are
constructed differently, and both were planned to find the data in a different
way. There are several reasons for this. One is just for the science! They know
that if you have two different detectors that both have data that comes to the
same conclusion, the probability that they are right is much better than if
there was just one detector. Another reason was that they wanted a little bit
of competition between projects, so as to motivate the scientists to make the
'better' collider, and in turn come up with two phenomenal detectors!

    Tomorrow is the 'Open Day' for ALL of the public to come
and see, so we are going to have one more interview with another scientist, and
also interview some of the people on the outside that come for an inside look
at this project. Unfortunately tomorrow is the last day of our excursion, so we
have to head back to Zurich
tomorrow evening, and catch our airplane early the next morning. =[ 

    Oh! And tonight we worked a lot on our video, and are
moving along fairly well with it. We just need to get ourselves taped, and add
the interviews we are doing tomorrow to it...so that’s basically it for
tonight.

    Bonne Nuit! 

References