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!

Einstein House

I was shocked learning about Einstein’s personal life. In pictures he just looked like he’d be the fun cooky uncle, so finding out his lack of involvement with his own kids was surprising. It changed my views of him in a negative way. Although I still have an enormous amount of respect for his accomplishments, I no longer respect who he was as a person. On another note, it was very intriguing being in his actual apartment and seeing the couch he actually used. 

The concepts that the professor discussed were interesting, and I was very familiar with them from courses I take for engineering. I was not expecting a class lecture though, so I wish I was more prepared. I probably would have drank coffee before. It was very neat understanding how equations I use in class were derived and connected to one another. 

History of Science in Geneva

This museum not only had really cool artifacts, but also a great view. I found it really cool that as we were getting the tour there was a lot we already knew and I remembered from previous museums. I find microscopes very interesting so it is always neat to see the progression of them throughout history. Also, the fact that they had two older microscopes out for us to look into was awesome! One of them was from 1860!

CERN

CERN was very interesting. There was so much to learn with all of the interactive exhibitions. I learn better from videos rather than reading, so I really appreciated this museum. The content was also just interesting on its own. I am always intrigued in what will be next; what new technologies with be developed and discovered. Learning that Higgs Boson was just recently proven in 2012 is amazing! It shows that there’s still a lot of unknowns that Higgs Boson particles will help us discover. I’m mainly excited in what it will tell us about our universe.

I just wish I could have been part of the team working on these ground breaking discoveries. One day I will help discover or develop something amazing. Learning about major scientistic breakthroughs on this trip has really inspired me.

CERN

CERN was very interesting and was able to put on a really good show. I loved the layout and how you could sit in little domes to get a short description of certain topics. One I found really interesting was the one about extra dimensions. It was saying that in our world that we experience on a daily basis we only can detect two or three dimensions where as atoms and particles have the ability to escape into many other dimensions. This short clip brought up string theory and the possibility of there being 9 different dimensions. I don't fully understand all of it but I did find it very cool to think about.

Einsteinhaus

One of the things I learned at the Einsteinhaus is that Albert Einstein struggled with his home life. Although Albert and his wife got along very well at first, things changed after he became famous. Since he was spending less and less time at home, he found other people to share his thoughts and ideas with besides his wife. They later split and eventually got a divorce, but Albert did pay child support. Then, Albert married his cousin. This is another example of how scientists are often thought of as robotic beings, when in reality they’re just people with their own lives and problems.

History of Science Museum

The History of Science Museum in Geneva was informative and interesting. Starting from the introduction by our tour guide, she gave us a brief background on the house the museum is located in. The United Nations wanted to originally be placed where the current museum is located but if the UN had the spot there would limited green space near the lake for people to walk around. I found the humidity tool to be quite interesting. This tool uses human hair and a needle to measure humidity in the air. I find this tool to be helpful as I have curly hair and humidity is not always my friend.

Einsteinhaus

The Einsteinhaus was pretty neat. Everyone knows about his scientific knowledge and contributions to modern theories, but his personal life is much less known, and I found later that the cousin he married was his 1st cousin.

CERN

I learned at CERN that the Higgs-boson was found with evidence in only 2012. Going through high school physics at the time it was discovered, it seemed as though it had already been found, but we only learned about the theory back then.

The CERN

So I learned so much at CERN, it actually hard for me to distinguish.
For starters, I didn't know what it was, so this field trip was entirely a learning experience.

I learned that CERN was a proton accelerator that was used for treating cancer and evaluating questions human beings have pondered for hundreds of years.  Through the evaluation of E=mc^2, mass can be formed from the energy of the colliding protons which are accelerated by electromagnetic forces.

I learned about anti matter from the corresponding museum, and how there may be a parallel universe full of identical matter capable of equalizing each other completely.  It is still a mystery how some of the original matter survived in the big bang without other anti matter equalizing it out, which I found rather intriguing.  :)

CERN Trip

During our trip to CERN I learned more on the Higgs Boson. Higgs Boson is physics' most searched particle for over the last 40 years. This interests me because the information on this particle states the particle doesn't actually do very much. The existence of evidence of the BEH (Brout-Englert-Higgs) field explains why fundamental particles have a mass. It is in this state of the BEH field where the Higgs Boson was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs, and discovered at CERN by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

CERN

I learned that Dark Matter is a really thing and not just cheesy a fiction! There were several displays in CERN explaining dark matter. We know it exists because the universe is expanding at a rate different than expected based on matter. We also know there was not equal dark matter to matter at the big bang because it did not cancel out and the universe exists! CERN uses the LHC (Large Haldron Collider) to study dark matter as well as other experiments.

CERN

One of the most interesting things I learned at CERN was the origin of the World Wide Web. The WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while he was working at CERN. Although scientists working with CERN typically spent some time on site, they usually worked at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Tim’s goal was to develop an easy method for these particle physicists from all over the world to exchange information. Since the Web plays such an important role in today’s society, it was really cool to see where it first began.

CERN Adventure

     We took a trip to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and went to the Microcosm museum and the Globe of Science and Innovation.  One of the most interesting things about the operation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is amount of the effort that goes into just starting up the loop. First the liquid helium cooling system is started to get the magnets down to a cool -271 degrees Celsius, to allow the magnets to become super conductors.  Next, Helium is injected into the smallest of the three loops. The magnets must be powered up and calibrated for this part. Then the particles speeds up and is moved into the medium sized ring for greater acceleration. Fourth, the particles are moved to the largest of the loops, at 27 kilometers. The particles are then accelerated as close to the speed of light as possible to get the best results. There are 4 different particle detectors that each search for different data. They are CMS, ATLAS, ALICE, and LHCb. As the particles reach the desired speed the readings are collected. The particles are now ready for a collision. It takes precise planning to get the particles to collide in one of the detectors. During the collisions, data is recorded to the storage bank, then processed to be able to be interpreted. The events are examined to determine what the collision produced.