We have succeeded! We arrived at SteemSTEM community meetup, we've met the first Steemians as Steem-Hikers and in the atmosphere of children's curiosity combined with a ton of fun we visited a part of CERN and saw the Large Hadron Collider! But it wasn't achieved without blood, sweat and tears...
If you don't know us yet, we are Steem-Hikers - two Steemians that are going to start a hitch-hiking trip around the world in 2018! Read more about us at our introduction post.
A few days since we have been expelled from work we've spent Uster, near Zurich. We'll write about that in the next post. Today we are moving on to February 8th, the day of our trip to the SteemSTEM community meetup. If you don't know by any chance what SteemSTEM is, here is a small reminder:
SteemSTEM - the best scientific community in Steem
SteemSTEM is a rapidly developing community of Steemians, which brings together and supports people who publish high quality, scientific content. You can find these contents under #steemstem tag. If you want to join the SteemSTEM community, you have an idea for interesting posts with scientific content, join our official Discord channel, or just start writing high quality posts under the #steemstem tag provided scientific sources on which you based your knowledge and sources for your pictures! More information about the SteemSTEM project can also be found on the @steemstem official profile.
The frenzy day before the meeting - or how a secret force from the center of CERN wanted to prevent us from reaching meetup!
We will remember this date for a long time. We returned from Zurich to Freiburg, where we had the bus to Geneva bought a month earlier. We were not specially prepared for hitchhiking (we didn't plan to travel too much while working in Germany), but most of all we didn't want to miss the meeting standing by the road with our thumbs up.... Thanks to the night bus, we could more or less comfortably sleep good 5-6 hours before the meeting.
The bus was to start at 11.20 PM from the main train station. We were in Freiburg after 1 PM, so we walked a little bit around the city and then went to McCafé to deal with some things on our computers (seek a new job, start writing posts, read more about LHC, etc.). Almost exactly when we sat at the table we received a text message about the fact that our bus was cancelled! 6 hours before departure!
We felt as if the fate hase come to us - not only did they throw us out of work, we also lost the transport to the meeting for which we decided not to start working immediately and (thanks to the kindness of Daniel, a friend of @ceybiicien) spend a few days in the quite close area to Fryburg. After several conversations with four different bus company representatives on the phone, it turned out that we can only count on a refund of the ticket value - the company did not guarantee an alternative transport or a refund of the costs of another transport. Quick research has shown that apart from the very expensive train, there is no transport from Fryburg to Geneva. For the next 3 hours we were sitting in a café trying to solve this crisis situation, started to feel how gradually our morale fell down and resignation and rage started to appear. It was already too late for hitchhiking, it started to get dark and there was no chance that we could get there on time. It was almost as if in the center of CERN was a white hole - some great power that pushes us away from this meeting and does not allow us to get there!
We decided not to give up and we strained our minds. We have climbed the heights of logistical thinking! Finally @ceybiicien found a car on blablacar, which was going from Berlin to Lyon. The car was driven by Maxim, a Ukrainian who spoke very well Polish. Lyon is not Geneva, but it was relatively close. We were planning to jump out somewhere on the way and hitchhike to Geneva. The meeting was scheduled for 10 AM and Maxim was to be in Lyon at 10.20 AM. - assuming that we jump out in the right place and that we were lucky with hitch-hiking, there was a chance that we would be able to be on time. But what if Maxim will get stuck in the traffic jam? What if he abandon us and won't come? What if he'll come 2-3 hours later? Doubts and adrenaline levels did not decrease, but were constantly rising at that moment.
We agreed with Maxim at ~5 AM in the morning at a place close to the motorway in Freiburg. It was ~7 PM. We spent the whole time at the railway station, in McDonald's, and when both places were closed - in a cold waiting room on the platform, where we tried to sleep a little bit so as not to be total zombies at the meeting which we were supposed to reach.
After walking 5km with heavy bundles we finally met Maxim. He came to us with a brand new, shiny V-class Mercedes. That was not what we expected! Maxim wasn't very talkative, but it was just fine for us - every minute of sleep in our case was worth a lot. After all, we wanted to understand what the main organiser of the meeting, @lemouth, will say us about LHC!
Maxim turned out to be very benevolent and made up the way to drop us at a very convenient petrol station. It was already about 9.15 AM, perhaps 9.30 AM and we still had about 60 km left... We created signs with the inscription Saint-Genis-Pouilly / Geneve and... soon enough we managed to be picked up by a friendly Frenchman of Polish roots, who brought us almost to CERN. It was already after 11, but only 2km left to our destination. Now we were able to take a little breathe and feel some relief... We informed the meeting participants that we are going to rush and soon we will be there and thankfully they waited for us!
SteemSTEM meetup - tons of laughter, useful informations and wonder about the nature of reality
The first attraction, the Universe of Particles exhibition, has been missed by us. We were warmly welcomed in that place by Steemians, and we started to slowly fell all the pressure and stress of the journey go down. Immediately @aurel.proorocu offered us help in putting our backpacks into his car and then we went to visit the Microcosm exhibition, where we could learn a lot about the history and activities of CERN and the Great Hadron Collider.
What you see above are the flight trajectories muons, alpha particles and electrons in real time! The glass box was filled with a special gas, which was ionized when the above mentioned particles passed through it, which resulted visual effect of their trajectory. Together with @dber, which we met at the table, we expressed a wish to have something like that in the living room!
After that we went for a dinner together to the Indian restaurant, where there was a chance to get to know one another, relax, refresh and laugh :) We asked the participants what they write about on Steemit and revealed some of them our world trip plan.
Then we went by car a dozen or so kilometres away, to the Compact Muon Solenoid. Together with @ceybiicien we found ourselves in a cramped car with @suesa, @reggaemuffin and @dber behind the wheel. During the ride we talked about the incredible properties of Mycelia and the joy for the American to ride roundabouts ;)
Inside there was a lecture given by @lemouth, who tried to make everyone not familiar with physics in detail understand what actually happens here, what we will see and what is being researched in CERN. He worked in this place for two years, so everyone listened him with interest about the most fundamental aspects of our reality and the struggle to find them. Together with a colleague who is currently working there, he has been patiently answering all the questions of the curious Steemians. We won't even try to explain things that we understand to a large extent intuitively, but we encourage you to get acquainted with the special post series about LHC, Bozon Higgs and CERN prepared for this meetup by @lemouth on his blog.
After the lecture we finally went downward, to see a fragment of the LHC! Before that, however, we were divided into two groups, we found ourselves in the latter. Our guide was a very enjoyable and amusing Hungarian, with a truly Hungarian, dark humour. Before going to the detector, we were shown some other interesting rooms, server room, computer center of the detector, etc.
We finally saw IT
Being aware of the power of this place has, how a huge sum of intellects from the best minds of this world led to the creation of this.... Thing. We were enchanted. We were also very satisfied that we were able to overcome the "white hole" problem and reach the meetup almost in spite of some strange physics laws ;)
We were so impressed all the time spent there but the visit at the detector had to be pretty short. We took some pictures and slowly started to go out almost drunken from science. Our state from that moment is best reflected by this gif:
Everybody went outside with "bananas on their faces". There was a little bit of confusion and we quickly disappeared with @tristan-muller, who took us to the hotel we had to check-in (our night bus to Freiburg that day was also cancelled...). As we later found out, everyone were wondering what had happened to us, whether we were not freezing somewhere outside... 😅 But it was just our phones were dead, and we were informed them that we're ok as soon as we could! @ceybiicien fell in a hotel out of tiredness and I was still able to meet the participants of the meeting in a pub and make extremely interesting conversations with @bendelgreco, @galotta, @kerriknox and @ana.luiza. Well, we're coming to an end! After a few beers we were all excited about what we had experienced, but also very tired so everyone went to wherever he stayed for a night.
I would like to thank all the participants of the meeting personally (@saunter) at this point, in particular:
@lemouth for the accessible sharing of knowledge, sharing his passion and work as well as for excellent organization of this meetup!
@suesa for the wonderful badges, which of course I had to lose, and as a result I had only put them in a pub and for binding and bonding all the nerds together!
@dber for chatting about mushrooms and having fun with roundabouts,
@bendelgreco and @galotta for an engaging but unfortunately too short discussion about the limits of human knowledge :)
I would also like to thank the whole community and all @steemstem's curators for their support of my posts about psychology!
No less interesting way back!
In the meantime, we managed to get a job in the Netherlands, where we were to appear on Monday at 8 AM. This post is already long enough, so I will only mention that the return was equally interesting and quite tiring. Hitchhiking with a specific date of arrival while not being very properly adapted for the weather takes away a lot of pleasure of travelling, however, it was quite interesting - we got to know the two Finns, one of them has been working in CERN for 14 years and together we complained about the geopolitical location of our countries, spent 14 hours at the petrol station near Dijon, we were caught by the gendarmerie in France while walking by foot on a highway, we caught 500km of hitchhiker to Lille... At the end we arrived happily to Rotterdam, from where we were picked up by our friend @ceybiicien and stayed at home on the sofa. Uff!!
