SteemSTEM Meetup at CERN/LHC
As I am sure you have seen in oh... I don't know... 21 other posts... This past Friday, the steemSTEM project had it's very first meetup in Geneva Switzerland at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire otherwise known as CERN. It was here that the group of 22 participants worshiped satan... (just kidding). It was at CERN that the group of us descended the depths into the Large Hadron Colider, and witnessed first hand one of the marvels of modern human engineering, the Compact Muon Solenoid detector.
My Arrival/First Dinner
I left Boston Massachusetts USA on wednesday night (late by about 1 hour due to inclement weather) traveling to Munich Germany where I would meet up with my significant other and she and I would complete our travels together on a separate flight into Geneva. Well...travel and me don't exactly mesh well, and despite my best efforts running through the Munich airport, I missed that first connecting flight by about 2 minutes (not that the plane didn't sit on the runway for another 30 minutes... grrrrrr). Anyway I caught the next flight to Geneva a few hours later. If you look carefully in the picture to the left you can see some of the (I believe...) alps peaking over the clouds during my descent into Geneva!
I landed, located my bored girlfriend patiently waiting at the airport, picked up our rental car and headed to our hotel room for a quick nap before heading off to meet some of the other steemSTEMians for dinner at a restaurant called Le Casanova for some Italian food, some wine and some conversation. On my way I met up with @lemouth and @grandpere (who were too many to fit in @dber s car) and we shuttled as a group off to the restaurant. When we arrived the majority of the rest of the group were already seated and the party started.
@suesa distributed some name tags to everyone (it's really hard to remember everyone's name and also steemit username).
As you can see from the picture above to the right, the food at the table was quickly eaten, wine drunk, and merriment had by the group. We all departed off to get some sleep before the next days activities.
Globe of Science/Indian Foods
We all reconvened at the Globe of Science and Innovation or as many brainless non steemSTEM steemian's call it, the flat plane of science and innovation :p
This portion of CERN's general exhibit for people to attend, had a nice movie, as well as some interesting objects on display. For instance it showed you the size of the canister of hydrogen nuclei (protons) used to create the proton beam that gets collided by the LHC.
We continued our tour of CERN led by @lemouth at Microcosm where we learned more about the history of accomplishments at CERN and departed for lunch at an Indian restaurant near the entrance to the CMS detector portion of the Large Hadron Colider.
CMS
Upon reaching the CMS and being educated by both @lemouth, who gave us a nice lecture on the basics of particle physics as well as Freya one of the particle physicists also working at CERN. We rode an elevator down to where particles colide. The image to the left should give you an idea of just how far we went down. Way at the top of that shaft, that's ground level. You can also see that running along that shaft are some christmas lights which according to our tour guide, serve no real purpose other than to indicate what direction the data from the LHC goes... which apparently is ... up. :D
We walked through the corridors, through the bitcoin miners, past the cables, around the radiation sources and finally arrived at our ultimate destination, the CMS detector itself. Boy, was it ever a sight to see... and to stand near! I am not sure why I look so grumpy in this photo, I can assure you I look pretty cheery in the various selfies that my girlfriend and I took together that I am not going to share with you all :p
This was the end of our tour and the grand delivery of the experience that @lemouth promised and delivered to all the members who showed up. It's one that I will certainly not forget!
After The Meetup Exploration of Geneva
The next day my girlfriend and I continued our exploration of Geneva taking in the various sights seeing things like.. a really big jet of water. (yes people in Geneva are so rich they have nothing better to do with their money then to just shoot water high into the air from their lake).
I also visited some old churches, botanical gardens with very few flowers (its winter!) where I learned of a fruit called "cheese fruit", and the Reformation Wall. My flights departed the next morning and after about 12 more hours of travel I returned to the good ole USA and work on Monday morning.
Other Things I Did
- Ate A $27 hamburger (food on Geneva is really expensive)
- Drank a $7 bottle of sparkling water (it wasn't even a big bottle!)
- Ate a cup of denmark
- Got lost more than once
- Ran out of battery in my cell phone from using the GPS too much to get me out of being lost
Here's to @steemstem, Steemit, and making peoples dreams become a reality.
I wonder what we will cook up for next year :)
I was going to join you guys, but prior commitments tempered my enthusiasm. I had to back out a few weeks ago.
This is the first post counting the visit I notice in my feed, and I will probably see many more. It looks like it was a terrific experience like @lemouth promised. Feeling the Blues... :-(
I will organise better plans for 2019, that's for sure ! :-)
Am glad you enjoyed it so much, and kudos for crossing the pond for the event!
You will be there for the next one, hopefully :)
I hope too!
I am really glad it was a great success! That implies probably "SteemStem at CERN II" :-)
Do you have an idea of when will be the earliest you will be able to know the dates? Earlier the better, like this I can plan a few days off without letting the kids down!
I have no idea. Also, I do not know whether the steemstem meetup 2 will be at CERN. STEM =!= physics :D
This being said, I will be glad to organize a smaller-scale meeting at some point in a year or so.
It would have been great if you'd been able to make it, but there is always next year!
Next year it is! What I also missed was meeting the other members of SteemStem.
I hope you all had fascinating discussions.
It was a really great meetup. My only concern is that it was damned too short. I didn't have the time to speak with everybody. Toe good thing is that this motivates me for organizing a V2, at some point :)
Yeah, I understand that. But our meetup had a goal in mind and wasn't just standing around chatting. We will have to plan another one for next year.
yep. Maybe 2 days instead of 1, and maybe something unrelated to physics, although I won't complain about it (we can for instance target ATLAS or the antimatter experiments).
I'd prefer a different topic for the next meetup :p
Science is too varried to always focus on particle physics. :D
I totally agree! This will also be more relaxing for me ;)
27 dollars a hamburger and 7 dollars a bottle of water is crazy, with that money in my country a family of 5 people eat super well for 15 days hahahaha
The food value ratio where you live sounds way better then in Switzerland!
If everything is much cheaper, but in relation to the minimum wage of a worker is terrible, a public employee who works 8 hours a day for 5 days a week and converts the national currency to dollars, is equivalent to 4 dollars per month .
That is why the serious crisis in the country, I say that food is cheaper for me because we work with Steem and that helps us a lot
Maaaan so many memories from the public museum bit and the water fountain. We drove from England and explored the mountainous villages, stayed in a ski resort and such. Made me decide Switzerland is one of the most beautiful places out there. Above ground and under.
I really wish you could have been there with us all Mobbs. Truly. Hopefully for next year's meetup.
Thanks for sharing your experiences at the steemstem-meetup. This is what I call "another level" . Travelling to Geneva ( one of the most expensive cities in the world), visiting the CERN and sharing with other scientists and steemians from all over the world. That is marvelous!
This is the opportunity that steemit and STEEM provides us. We must make the most of this chance, the world will not change on it's own, we must be the bringers of change. :)
I am guessing that if people in Geneva were richer they would shoot their expensive burgers up in the air instead of water from their lakes, but a $27 hamburger sounds fancy :) I hope you enjoyed the meetup!
I've had a better hamburger for $5
Price isn't everything. :)
Also lol at the idea of shooting hamburgers in the air. Jet d'hamburger.
ahahah I like how the name sounds!
When you know that the minimal salary is of bout 3 kEUR a month... :)
This is quite an experience. You look grumpy in the picture, perhaps because you were having fun and didn't see the need to impress anyone with that fact. And I believe you looked better in the other selfie because no one would take selfies with their girlfriends looking grumpy, if for no other reason, at least to appear like a sufficiently good looking guy to be with a beautiful woman :)
It sounds like you guys had fun and I join you in celebrating steemit and steemstem for dreams that become reality. Thanks for sharing your experience with us. Welcome back.
Seems reasonable, I rarely see the need to impress anyone. :)
I can imagine you don't. Impressive people would not be impressive if they spent their time trying to impress people. As I told someone yesterday, the best works are done in the shadows but the results are clear for everyone to see. Thanks for writing back 👍
If one spends their time trying to impress others, they aren't using that time for actually doing something worth doing. So yeah, that's very true IMO.
Okay, so I didn't know what IMO was. Google helped. Now I know. But it is an odd definition. Urban dictionary said, "it is used when you want to significantly weaken your argument" 😀
I suppose there is no rule that says I cannot reply this comment too. The worst that could happen is that your comments section may start freezing the pc of people who visit your blog :)
By the way, I live in a state called Imo so I couldn't ignore.
Significantly weaken your argument.... It just means in my opinion. :)
Yeah, they said that too :)
The strangest thing about all of these posts are people putting a face to their username.
Anyways so I am thinking in order to top this for the next meetup we need to get onto one of the reduced-gravity planes or something :D
That sounds like it would be a lot of fun!
If you think that's strange wait until I make one and put my ass!
Geneva looks like a city I'd love to retire in after I'm crypto rich :)
Then I can afford a $100 cup of water. The size of that CMS is huge from every angle. Cheers for sharing some pictures with us at home wishing we did make it to the place.
Lol, yeah I think one needs to be crypto rich to survive there. It's sad when $100 cup of water doesn't seem too far off.
We need to decentralise some more things offline or else the future would be in trouble.
Thank you for this guiding tour!
It seems that you are down to earth in how you perceive what you encounter. The Hamburger deluxe was certainly the result of a very happy cattle, which during its lifetime believed itself to be in the good company of its fellow cattle and which was treated well in life as in death. At least that's my hope.
As a US-American, you are probably amazed at some of the meager European portions and that water is not served free of charge. During my stays in the States, it was my turn to be astonished by the impressive size of the cups, which did not exist here in Germany until recently.
So, what kind of conspiracy were you guys up by finishing your meetup?
Finally, I know now your name and I am delighted to say, I am pleased to meet you, Rob :-)
Oh lordy, hamburger deluxe... If only. It was a lousy hamburger lol. It's a funny to me that I made this whole post and almost all my comments are about the hamburger. Lol. I took the wrong pictures!
I've been to Europe a few times, I've never found the portions to be all that small. Paying for water is stupid, but paying $7 for it is more a shame on me then anyone else lol.
What conspiracy we're we up to? You will have to find out.