The highway drive was spent in pleasant conversation with each other so that I barely noticed that we were coming up on Geneva on the autoroute. As we neared the city, we both attempted to contribute to the navigation, Okki using the onboard GPS voice and map, and me using my knowledge and memory from the maps I'd studied, and then going by the road signs just like we used to in the old days. We made the correct turn on the road to the little town of Meyrin, where the lab is located, and soon we were obviously at the site, but the CPS took us to a secure entrance, not the visitor parking lot. Somehow the combination of talents had not given us a flawless arrival. Okki got gas a station next to the big globe museum while I used my iPhone to go to the CERN web site and look for the parking lot on the visitor instructions page.
We figured out our error and soon found the little service road around the black of the giant globe, where had the morning visitor lot to ourselves. We parked and approached the globe building, which houses the Universe of Particles museum, and we went inside. It was dark like a planetarium with glowing exhibits befitting something having to do with space and cosmology. There were small global like kiosks, chest high, scattered throughout the room with small viewing ports to exhibits inside. The design made it difficult for more than one person to look inside the exhibit at the same time.
The exhibits had various exhibitions of landmarks in particle physics, both theoretical and experimental. The ones I found most interest were the ones containing actual historical artifacts, especially the one with the first ever particle collider, the cyclotron, which was built in 1930. It was less than a foot in size. Beautiful. Simple. Crude as a revolutionary scientific instrument should be.
The second artifact I loved seeing was the original NeXT machine that ran the first web server in 1989.
There you have it, the modern world in two machines.
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