Uniquely Geneva
Today was a busy sampling of some of what makes Geneva unique.
We started at the Alley of Flags outside the United Nations' European headquarters building. Every member country's flag is represented, and serves as a reminder to the world that its nations should aim to be more united than divided.
Across the street is a giant wooden sculpture of a broken chair, which is missing the lower half of one leg. This symbolizes the international campaign against landmines, which impacted my daughter's outlook on the world through her participation in a Model UN simulation during high school, specifically involving landmines in Angola.
A couple blocks away we wandered through the Botanical Gardens of Geneva, nearly 70 spectacular acres of beauty. We could easily stay there all day.
On the opposite side of the UN, we checked out the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, a sobering portrait of the unnecessary suffering caused by wars and other conflicts. The Red Cross founder's book about medical relief workers in battlefields led to the first Geneva Convention effort to establish rules for war and reduce casualties.
After a very fine Lebanese lunch, we went to CERN, near the French border. CERN is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest physics laboratory in the world. It was at CERN that Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, HTML, URL system and HTTP in 1989. And also here that the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, confirming an elusive 50-year-old theory in particle physics. Please don't expect me to unpack this any further; quarks and photons are involved and it's wayyy over my head.
But one of my brothers-in-law worked at CERN off-and-on for at least 15 years as an engineer on the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider that facilitated the Higgs boson discovery. And that's cool.
CERN is where elite theoretical physicists go to collide and rub elbows (or particles) with even more elite colleagues. Their discoveries help with the understanding of the origins of the universe and nature of matter itself, with practical applications such as advanced cancer treatments.
UN, Red Cross, CERN. Watches, chocolates, cheese. Geneva!
By the numbers:
27 kilometers - the circumference of the Large Hadron Collider, which is buried in a tunnel underneath CERN, and one of many insane numbers at CERN
193 member countries in the United Nations
11,000 plant species from around the world at Geneva's botanical gardens
18,703 steps today. Whew!
97,000,000 Red Cross volunteers worldwide
110,000,000 active landmines still out there
13,800,000,000 years since the Big Bang, another popular topic at CERN
If you're enjoying the blog, please subscribe, share, comment, etc.
