Impressions of a weekend at CERN

Find out what some of those who attended a recent alumni trip to Geneva thought of the centerpiece of the weekend: a day spent exploring CERN.

Kathrina Latif (MSc Centre for Environmental Policy 2005)

“Every now and again you hear about CERN but it’s really difficult to get here, so I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit. I was amazed by the sheer size of this facility – it’s huge. You can’t see the majority of the experiments because it is underground, but you can get an impression of how much money and how much effort goes into these scientific tests and experiments, and that’s really amazing.”

Amarnath Wahi (MSc Electrical and Electronic Engineering 1970) and wife Hadmut Wahi

“My wife and I have not been here before and you realise the huge amount of effort which goes in. The lecture in the morning described how it all started after the war when they decided to get all the nations together. In fact it was an early open source of knowledge – every country had access. It was amazing to hear that they didn’t even patent anything for a number of years. Of course the whole engineering part is just amazing, but it is quite a lot, you really can’t cope with it all in a day. We’ll have to come back!”

Mahamadou Baradji (MSc Aeronautics 2013)

“CERN is a world class scientific facility, and I don’t think I would have had this opportunity on my own so thankfully the Imperial alumni proposed this and I jumped at the chance! I come from an engineering background and I was happy that there was a lot of very theoretical stuff. The most interesting thing was that CERN works with people from different disciplines.”

Sophie Emerson (daughter of Bill Emerson, MSc Computing 1992)

"We decided only a month ago because we were on the waiting list – I got a text from my Dad when I was in my physics lecture saying, ‘do you want to go to CERN?’! It’s just impossible to come here on holidays because I have a few younger brothers and sisters and it was a good chance to see Switzerland, I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise.”

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