Natural History Museum - Switzerland

I learned at this museum most from the collection of collaborative learning exhibits!  Its probably sad to say but that was my favorite part of this museum.  It was fascinating how the villa that it was contained within was also one of the exhibits. 
It was crazy to see the first battery, made in 1800 by Alessandro Volta.  There were other instruments at that location that support Einstein's Theory of relativity used in the University of Geneva's Physics department.  There was also a hydraulic turbine simulation which I found particularly intriguing. 
I learned that having hands on exhibits really impacts the retention of the machines and that gear ratios are fun :)

History of Science Geneva

I thought the History of Science Museum in Geneva was really cool. It was actually my favorite museum of the trip because I learned so much from the exhibits and the guide. I thought it was neat how the first battery was invented in Switzerland. I also really liked the machine that was built to simulate the northern lights, even though the science behind why it worked was not reflective of the true phenomena. We rarely learn about about Switzerland's contributions to the early history of science, so the overall experience at this museum was truly eye opening.

CERN

I thought the Microcosm and Universe of Particles exhibits at CERN were really interesting. I liked that Microcosm include to scale replicas of the different objects used for the experiments. One thing I learned is that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN to help ease communication between scientists. I always thought it had been invented in the United States. With the scale of their experiments though, it makes sense that they would need the WWW and want to create it.

History of Science in Switzerland Museum

     The history of science in Switzerland museum was a very interesting experience. I had no idea that there was so much science that sprouted from this area. One man had is own room. Horace Bénédict de Saussure was a swiss physicist who studied electricity throughout the alps. He also created a hydrometer that was able to be calibrated to give correct readings. So much so, that he received as many as 200 orders for them from all over europe. In addition to being a physicist, he also studied the geology of the swiss alps. He was the first person to extensively study and map out the alps. he would go on expidentitions and take a team of scientists and instruments to study the alps. 

    

History of Science Museum in Geneva

This museum was actually one of my favorites on the entire trip! The tour guide was really interesting! She had great english and explained things very easily so that even non-scientific majors could understand.  I thought it was cool learning about other scientists from Geneva who not many people are familiar with because normally we always stick to the same few who are famous like Newton and Galileo.  Seeing the first ever battery was my favorite part for sure! It was so big and so cool to see! I actually understood a lot of the science behind a lot of the devices we saw which I really enjoyed.  Overall it was a great visit and had an amazing view of the lake in Geneva!

Cern

One of the reasons I wanted to go on this trip was to see cern so I was very excited for this day trip! Something that I learned new was the Higgs boson particle. This was an idea about a Higgs field which basically explains how objects have a mass. It was a missing piece of the puzzle in explaining the universe and can also open up possibilities for new discoveries.

History of Science Museum

My favorite display was the quartant. In trigonometry one subject that always confused me was using ratios to find the heights of objects. To find the hight of an object with a quartant, all that is needed it the elevation of the quartant and the distance from the quartant to the tree. Then, the sites of the quartant can be set at the top of the tree. This gives us the angle created from the top of the tree to quartant against a horizontal plane. We know cosine of that angle is equal to the distance to the object, in the case of the tree. Therefore the hypotenuse can be calculated as the distance divided by the cosine of the angle. Since the hight of the tree relative to the quartant is equal to the hypotenuse times sine of the angle, the hight is equal to sine of the angle times the distance to the tree divided by cosine of the angle, which simplifies to distance times the tangent of the angle!