What can you do on a rainy day in Geneva with 2 children? Take a trip out to CERN and spend an hour and a quarter watching an enthusiastic scientist explaining how fridges work, what the biggest greenhouse gas is (water vapour not CO2) as he waved liquid nitrogen around, supercooled magnets so that they’d float in space (either my french or my physics wasn’t quite up to translating how or why he’d done this), showed how to make a thermometer to measure REALLY cold temperatures and much more and only then made ice cream using the liquid nitrogen. (In Oxford the student scientists at the Natural History Museum’s WOW Science day just freeze bananas and balloons before they move onto the ice-cream making).

All that and you can see the first ever web server!!!! (It is a small black computer and really not very interesting).

And there are spark chambers showing cosmic rays zapping through the earth and lots of “cool stuff” to quote my 7 and 9 year old.

So don’t believe the tourist office in Geneva when they tell you that CERN isn’t open because of the new Hadron collider . the tours may have stopped for a while or be fully booked for 3 months but you can still get a feel for the place by going to the Microcosm exhibition, which is, I think, open every day and is free.

Check out:
http://microcosm.web.cern.ch/Microcosm/Content/Exhibition…

Located since 1954 just a few hundred metres from the French border, CERN is the European laboratory for research into particle physics.
More than 6000 physicists from all over the world use gigantic accelerators such as the LEP, an enormous high-tech underground ring (27km circumference) which runs around the laboratory.
To see: the Microcosm exhibition which takes you from the smallest of particles to the confines of the universe. 3 hour guided tour during which you will come face-to-face with the researchers who are attempting to understand the fundamental laws governing matter.