Our Trip to CERN by Toby Lukehurst

Below is an account from a student at Trinity Catholic School on their school trip to CERN in January 2014, organised by Adaptable Travel.

DAY 1

Fueled with a half eaten breakfast, excitement and caffeine we set off. With everyone still half asleep, including our teachers, the coach and plane journey out to Switzerland was uneventful. When we got to Switzerland we visited ITU and the ICT Discovery. This featured of a short presentation of the ITU. Personally I found this very fascinating. They described how the ICU monitors satellites and radio signals. We then went around the ICT Discovery. This was a museum about the development of the Internet. This museum consisted of; interactive tablets, a space suit that has been to space and ended up in a game we played on the tablets. This started a competition, which I ended up winning.

DAY 2

On the second day we woke up and got the tram to CERN. The first job of the day was a presentation. This was highly engaging. We learnt all about quarks, antimatter and the reasoning behind the hadron collider. It was in this presentation when we discovered what was going to make this trip to CERN so special. This is when we found out we were able to go underground at CMS to see the detector. After our presentation we were shown a cross section of the collider. This gave us the unique chance to see what makes the massive pipe way. We then had our chance to go underground at CMS and see the detector. This was spectacular. The detector looked like something from a Sci-fi film. It was unfathomable. They explained to us how the detector was formed and how they managed to get it underground, it weighed twice as much as the Eiffel Tower!

DAY 3

On the third day we visited the museum of science on the lakeside. This was fantastically fun as there was many practice experiments we got to play with. We walked around the lake to see the Jet d’Eau. This is a 98-foot fountain, which is fabulous.Overall we did many things on our visit to CERN and there is not one thing I could pick out that was my favorite but what I can now do is understand why this was my friend’s second time visiting.  I can’t wait to go again next year!  

To find out more about school trips to CERN with Adaptable Travel, contact us today.