h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you are ever in the San Francisco Bay Area you (meaning anybody excited by particle physics and who is reading this entry) ought to visit the Stanford Linear Accelerator. They have guided tours, and you can see all these concepts in action. It's a lot of fun.

I've been studying particle acelerators for A-level Nuclear Physics, good fun, good article.

Talking about visiting accelerators... the CERN, mentioned in the article, can also be visited.
I grew up in a house just above the LEP tunnel, which stands for Large Electon-Positron (collider), which is the largest of its kind, with 9 km in diameter, 27 km round.
More information about the CERN and its accelerators can be found at http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/ACCELERATORS/Welcome.html.

My favourite one is next to my brake pedal.

Works too.

Just ask the b*****d copper who pulled me doing 102 mph a few weeks back.

My favourite is commonly referred to as a 'telly'.

CERN. In October they are going to stop all visits and rebuild their LEP accerlerator to make a LHC. It will be even more powerful and it's detectors will be something like 6 storeys high instead of only 3. The current accelerator is buried averagely at 100 metres underground and is under the France-Switzerland border (everyone who didn't know that raise your hand!). They have anti-matter there and are currently experimenting with electrons and positrons...



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Fortunately CERN does not stop visits at all (as far as I can see from the inside of CERN ). It is true that LEP will be shut down at the end of september 2000 but there are more things to see than the LEP experiments. There are other experiments that can be visited. And CERN has an excellent exhibition about particle accelerators and detectors. Furthermore there will be new experiments for the LHC accelerator which will be started in 2005. But physicists are already designing and testing the new components which certainly is worth a visit as well.

Best regards,

R146533