Thirty three Year 12 Physics students visited Geneva in May, primarily to tour CERN, but they also had a tour of the UN buildings and the Red Cross museum, and took a trip over the border into France to ride a cable car up Mont Saleve. 

At CERN, the students enjoyed a guided tour around some selected areas of the site. They appreciated having their questions answered by some of the current researchers and were able to eat their lunch in the CERN staff restaurant, surrounded by scientists.  In the evenings, they sampled the local cuisine with flammkuchen being popular and practised our ball skills with a ten-pin bowling session.

Year 12 student Amaris reflects on the experience,
"Even if this was only for a brief moment of the trip, I really enjoyed visiting the broken chair through almost torrential rain, simply because it was so stimulating to take photos with it and admire the construction as the rain fell around us. Moreover, the moment that struck me most was when we first entered the CERN compound and saw this beautiful steel statue that had all the famous theorems and formulae that shape our physics world today. I really enjoyed reading the contributions made to physics by many different researchers from across time. Later I found out this statue is called “Wandering the Immeasurable”, which I find a truly fitting name to represent all the hidden possibilities within our universe. At the end of our visit to the CMS, we collected one or two rocks each so we could have “stones from CERN”, the closest thing to the actual accelerator that we could take home, it was great fun trying to find the most unique ones – I even managed to find one that has a pattern resembling the Greek letter “Phi”.