CERN Science Gateway — Attraction in Meyrin

The most rude not caring not knowledgable staff i encountered in my life , the most ignorant illogical instructions in the hall, what a disgrace Especially the Phebe person , who is shouting , extra confrontational, behaving not like the staff in the museum should , to put it politely. she also said multiple times that I had no right to look at her badge with her name , while she’s wearing it on her clothes

The worst part is when I tried to explain the problems I encountered to staff, to manager , they cut my speech short after the first sentence , they didn’t care about what’s wrong with the process!!! They only wanted to make it work as fast as possible , not acknowledging misleading info, didn’t want to hear what is unclear in the instructions

And prepare for this now… manager said I have to look him in the eyes when i speak to him!!!! This is insane!!! Never have i heard such a rude remark in conversation !!!!

lady in the hall told me we need to exchange booking confirmation to passes, but again it was false !!! No passes needed. More time wasted When i asked this lady another question about registration she just answered “i don’t know” Just such a huge pile of false instructions and rudeness, this is honestly the worst place on earth

Some nitty grits about the problems:

so. We tried to register, as you already know, you can’t register online from the comfort of your own home, you have to sit in the noisy hall and fill out all the information about your residence etc Instructions on the hall’s stand on how to do it are not clear , i would say downright false!! So it says : first step connect to wifi!! So i connect to wifi, it requires access code aent to your email, when you open email with the code the whole wifi connection page disappears and you can’t go back there again , turns out you have to connect again and enter this old code , not request a new one (we figured it out ourselves, staff just kept interrupting and shouting “you don’t need access code” when we tried to explain the problem, it didn’t even occur to them we might want to connect to wifi not only for the purpose of registration, but just to have a better connection, which brings us to the next point

turns out for registration you didn’t have to connect to wifi at all!!!!! Although it is listed as first step On wifi connection page you just had to skip to the second step already , so not actually connect to internet

When you try different route “scan the qr code” it just says “server is not responding”

Okay, whatever, then there are many options what you can choose , they are like “quantum world”, “our universe”, “science show”, “movie”, “tour”, etc , for each you need to register separately, then after registering for all I want, I was told by manager that you can choose only 1 and it gives you access to all the others! This is outright crazy, nowhere on the page it was written and, when we came, staff told us we can’t come in before registering for all the activities we want in the list! So much time wasted. And we didn’t even want to book a tour!!! We only wanted to go to free exhibitions! I read in other reviews you don’t even have to register for that When i asked manager why is that so at first he wasn’t acknowledging the question, but when i suggested they should care more about feedback to make experience better for future visitors, he said in a derogatory tone “you are the first one who asked this question. I work here 5 years and it never happenned before”. without giving the...

Near Geneva, we visited CERN! And it was 🤯mind blowing!

CERN, the European (24 members) Organization for Nuclear Research, est. 1954.

CERN Science Gateway is a place to explore in a very fun and innovative way the matter at the atomic scale, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the origins of the universe and quantum physics.

🚊The museum is based in a suburb of Geneva, 30 min tram ride, and is free.

We spent 2 hours just in the first room, playing and exploring the collider functioning.

🧲 A game with activating magnets and a small ball to understand the CERN electromagnets, dipoles generating 8.3 tesla magnetic fields (100,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field !) 🥶Infrared detector game to grasp the notion of the vacuum cryogenic system (Did you know that LHC is one of the coldest places on Earth (1.9 K (-271.3°C), colder than outer space) 🪢The display on the coils' niobium-titanium (NbTi) wires serving as superconductors 🌫️Video explanation on the heavy gases, argon or krypton, kept in a liquid state, for detecting particles in calorimeters ⚽Game of proton football ! giving you the feel of E = mc2 formula.

My son left with a great souvenir: Standard Model fridge magnets of The Higgs boson, Quarks, Neutrinos, Graviton, Photon...

Art installations complete the expo, to explore Space & Time, the Void (the Quantum Vacuum), and the Invisible (Dark Matter). Chroma VII by Korean artist, Yunchul Kim, inspired by the connections between space, energy, and matter.

🌌Cloud Chamber was mesmerising and my favourite attraction! Just like observing the cosmos, but on a micro scale!

Cloud Chamber, one of the first particle detectors and was used to discover the positron, positively charged electron (Nobel Prize 1932) and the muon, similar to an electron 200 times heavier (Nobel Prize 1936). Using dry ice and isopropanol makes cosmic particles and natural radiation visible. Observe in the last video : straight lines - muon, zig zag - positron, broken streaks - particle decay, ex. muon transforming into lighter particles.

You can explore here for hours! But the brain might overheat : ) 🍦Luckily there is Big Bang café for...

Awful staff, so rude and unhelpful. If I hadn’t been with my nephew I would have walked out, but my nephew was eager to see it. Major disappointment all round. I’d been looking forward to learning something new, now I am only enraged. I hope it improves from here.

I suggest that if you employ people in public facing roles, when someone from the public asks for assistance, the staff are trained in being helpful.

I don’t recall such treatment for decades.

Update - after leaving CERN

While we attempted to use their online system to get tickets, we headed to the cafe downstairs. Again, another online form to complete. Waited 45 minutes for the wrong order. When we asked for the right food, the staff couldn’t help and we were asked to eat what their system told us we ordered even though that wasn’t what we had on our receipt. It was explained their system wasn’t working correctly. In hindsight it didn’t matter as the food awful - poorly reheated and presented.

We tried twice to go on tours (tickets released at 30 minute intervals). While we had completed the online info within 10 seconds (!), we were not successful on either occasion.

Risking further insult, we went upstairs to ask for assistance. It was confirmed that we were not booked, but we were advised their were 4 more places (we were a party of 3). We returned to the online booking form, but it said full. The man behind the counter said he could offer no more help, explaining their systems were not working well and he didn’t know which was accurate. Unlike the female staff member, he was polite and apologised for the problems.

In an over optimistic attempt to salvage something from the 2 hour journey to CERN, we hesitantly climbed the stairs to the exhibition. Sadly, many exhibits weren’t working, those that did were poorly explained.

In desperation for knowledge, I went to Wikipedia on CERN. I learned much more there than at CERN.

While it was free, it cost us 15 hours of our collective lives we will never get back. Clearly, in the space time continuum, this is of no significance to CERN.

I think even the staff would agree, it’s awful, and not about...