Chasing particles on bike at CERN

A practising solicitor turned OU physics student travels to Geneva to study the Large Hadron Collider. You can follow his blog and get the insight of – arguably - the most exciting scientific project of the century.

James Doherty studied law at Cambridge and Oxford before going on to qualify as a solicitor at a big law firm in the City of London where he practiced for four years. However he had always craved a passion for physics. Eventually he gave up the wing collar and enrolled on a physics degree module with the Open University.

Arriving at a halfway point of his module he received a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the summer months at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research headquarters in Geneva, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and a home of the 27-kilometre circular racing track for particles – the Large Hadron Collider.

James secured a place on the CERN Student Summer Programme 2013 and will be blogging about his experiences throughout the summer.

He writes:

‘CERN’s main Meyrin site spans the Swiss/French border and is plonked in the midst of beautiful agricultural estates which nestle in the shadows of the Jura mountain range. The largest accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, are buried deep beneath French farmland and so there are several CERN outposts dotted around in France too.

'The Meyrin site is massive and appears haphazardly distributed on arrival. Building are numbered in the order in which they were built and Building 41 will be my home for the next two months.’

Do not miss the report of the first collision he has already had and check out James’s cool ‘science pants’.

Posted on 16 July 2013.