Microcosm or CERN Museum was an interactive exhibition presenting the work of the CERN

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) and ...

laboratory and its flagship accelerator the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundr ...

(LHC). It first opened to the public in 1990 and closed permanently in September 2022, to be replaced by the ''Science Gateway'' in 2023. The final version of the exhibition opened in January 2016, developed by CERN in collaboration with Spanish design team Indissoluble.

History

The project was approved by the CERN Directorate in February 1988. The initial construction, to a large extent completed in 1989, was financed through contributions from the

Canton of Geneva The Canton of Geneva, officially the Republic and Canton of Geneva (french: link=no, République et canton de Genève; frp, Rèpublica et canton de Geneva; german: Republik und Kanton Genf; it, Repubblica e Cantone di Ginevra; rm, Republica e ...

, the

Swiss Confederation ; rm, citad federala, links=no). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzon ...

, neighbouring

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan ar ...

, banks, and industrial firms. CMS life-size model at Microcosm exhibition

Main exhibits

The exhibition displayed many real objects, taking visitors on a journey through CERN's key installations, from the

hydrogen Hydrogen is the chemical element with the symbol H and atomic number 1. Hydrogen is the lightest element. At standard conditions hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules having the formula . It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic ...

bottle, source of the protons that are injected into the LHC, through the first step in the accelerator chain, the

linac A linear particle accelerator (often shortened to linac) is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear ...

, on to a model of a section of the Large Hadron Collider including elements from the superconducting magnets. Visitors could interact with the displays to try their hand at the controls of a

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel electric charge, charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined particle beam, beams. Large accelerators are used for fun ...

– simulating the acceleration of protons in the LHC and bringing them into collision inside the

experiments An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when ...

. The exhibition contained a 1:1 scale model of a complete slice through the CMS experiment at the LHC. The computing section displayed some of the

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The wor ...

data tapes used to store the 30-40

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s of data produced yearly by the experiments, made available for analysis using the LHC Computing GRID. The annex to the exhibition contained other historical artifacts such as the central tracker from the UA1 detector, which ran at the

Super Proton Synchrotron The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland. History The SPS was d ...

at CERN from 1981 to 1984, and helped discover the

W and Z bosons In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are , , and ...

Special projects

A project began in 2013 to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. Some of the original code resides on

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profe ...

NeXT Computer NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of , aimed at the hig ...

in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact. This effort coincided with the 20th anniversary of the research center giving the web to the world.

Microcosm garden

The Microcosm garden is named Léon Van Hove Square in honour of CERN's Research Director-General from 1976 to 1980. The garden features several large components of old CERN experiments. Image:Microcosm_Garden.jpg, The garden view Image:Microcosm 0048.jpg, General view of the Detectors room Image:Microcosm 0017.jpg, Entrance to the exhibition Image:Microcosm 0031.jpg, Introduction to the particles room Image:Big_European_Bubble_Chamber.jpg, The Big European Bubble Chamber Image:LEP_RF.jpg, An

RF cavity A microwave cavity or '' radio frequency (RF) cavity'' is a special type of resonator, consisting of a closed (or largely closed) metal structure that confines electromagnetic fields in the microwave region of the spectrum. The structure is ei ...

from the

Large Electron–Positron Collider The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland. LEP collided elec ...

Image:Microcosm_initial_accelerator.jpg, Initial stages of an old

Image:CERN-Introduction to the particles room.jpg, Particles room also features an interactive

cloud chamber A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson cloud chamber, is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. A cloud chamber consists of a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapour of water or alcohol. A ...

- device capable of displaying normally undetectable traces of

radiation In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium. This includes: * ''electromagnetic radiation'', such as radio waves, microwaves, infrared, vi ...

Image:Microcosm 0028.jpg, Measuring energy detector Image:Microcosm 0037.jpg, Detectors room Image:Microcosm 0006.jpg, DATA room Image:Microcosm 0011.jpg, LHC control room Image:UA1.jpg, The central section of the UA1 experiment on display at the Microcosm museum

Location

Microcosm was located at CERN in the

, Switzerland, near the town of

Meyrin Meyrin () is a municipality of the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. The main site of CERN, the European particle physics research organisation, is in Meyrin. Meyrin was originally a small agricultural village until the 1950s, when construction of ...

. Entrance was free, without reservation, open 6 days a week.

References

External links

CERN Microcosm WebpageINDISSOLUBLE
{{authority control Science museums in Switzerland Museums in the canton of Geneva CERN