Youth Forum visits CERN

After we arrived at CERN on Tuesday morning our guide gave us a short overview of the organisation, founded in 1954. We learned that CERN is the home of the Internet and the place that Tim Berners-Lee first made a connection with other scientists from around the world in the late 1980s. Berners-Lee’s reason for creating the Internet was to get in touch with his fellow scientists and provide a faster way to exchange information.

CERN is most widely known for its study of physics and “the fundamental building blocks of all things”. Fifteen years ago the CERN council were given the go ahead to construct the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 100m-deep, 27km-circumference pipeline firing two beams of particles at each in other in an attempt to provide scientists with answers to questions relating to particle physics.

I visited the CERN LHC testing centre, the area where CERN’s scientists test parts of the LHC to ensure the equipment works perfectly before being used for experiments.

Stephen Smith, one of the youth fellows from New Zealand, visited CERN’s data storage and computer processing centre, a „very warm and extremely loud“ building where the electronic brains behind CERN are housed.

The data collected from the LHC is astronomical, with scientists telling us that it will provide them with 15 petabytes of data each year (fifteen million gigabytes), data that if stored on CDs would be enough to build a 20km high CD tower. The raw data is stored on magnetic tape in Geneva and sent around the world over a specific grid network.

Etienne Muller (Youth Forum ambassador, Switzerland)