CERN: Geneva, Switzerland (September 23, 2025)
Today, I visited NERD Mecca: CERN.
This is where fellow Internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee (a British scientist) invented the World Wide Web so that scientists all over the world could easily share their documents (despite the much hyped urban legend that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet).
Sweet full circle moment having created the first commercial websites in 1994!
Why is this picture so important to me? 31 years ago in 1994, I joined Modem Media and created some of the very first commercial websites for AT&T, CBS, Coors Brewing Company and MasterCard (to name a few) when there were only 50,000 websites in existance and that was mostly educational and government websites (today there are over 1.13 billion websites).
Today I was able to check out (admire, really) the very first web server to go online in 1989 (I was still a junior in High School) and noticed that it was a NeXT computer (which was founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he was kicked out of Apple). I mean this is a part of MY history on display. The very stuff of legend that I lived through as a kid and eventually took part of as a young adult that launched my career in digital marketing … nearly at the very start of it all.
Bill Carmody, Brent Mclean and Violet Carmody together at CERN geeking out
Perhaps my favorite part of today was Violet asking all these specific questions about how the Internet was first started by Tim Berners-Lee and answering questions like:
What’s a modem?
But what was the modem connected to?
How does WiFi work?
How is that different than cellular networks?
How can a computer process so many individual data requests?
When I say I “geeked out” both Brent and I loved sharing our knowledge and history with Violet. While I was working at digital marketing agencies, Brent worked at Hewlett Packard and T-Mobile so between the two of us we helped demystify the Internet and mobile technologies for Violet. It was really fun to stand there as subject matter experts. (And a few people were leaning in to listen to our conversations as they were equally interested in how it all started).
Tim Berners-Lee, the man, myth, & legend who started the World Wide Web
So after Violet peppered us with sufficient questions and Brent and I felt we shared the bulk of our historic experience and base knowledge about computers and the Internet, we moved onto some other incredible exhibits. CERN has become a lot more like the Exploratorium in San Francisco — many cool exhibits that help to demystify particle acceleration and quantum physics. (I did mention this is NERD Mecca).
Really fun game to help explain the challenges with particle acceleration
There was so much to unpack and learn during our time at CERN. But this game Violet is playing is a good representation of how CERN makes learning about particle acceleration in general and CERN’s Proton Synchrotron Booster works. Each participant has a button that “turns on” the magnetic ring. The circle is slanted so that the ball with “rest” at Violet’s position … unless you work together to accelerate the metal ball using precise timing of turning “on” and “off” the magnetic rings to speed up and accelerate the ball representing a particle.
While the concept is dead simple to understand, it quickly becomes clear that everybody must fire their individual magnetic ring at precisely the right moment to accelerate the ball. Otherwise, you slow down or even stop the momentum dead in its tracks. Enough challenge to be interesting and enough skill challenge to be incredibly frustrating when you know what you want to do, but your timing is even a little bit off.
Bill and Violet attempt to collide particles by kicking them towards each other
Another exhibit had two participants kicking timed particles towards each other to watch them smash together. Here again, the concept is simple: aim a red particle toward your partner and kick at about the same speed to see two particles collide and explode with vivid imagery and colors. You are given a countdown and directions, but still it’s harder than it looks (and that’s the point).
Particle air hockey anyone? Brent and I had a fun time accelerating particles!
How does one get a particle through a wall? In wave formation, it’s much easier to go through walls, but in particle formation it just bounces back on your side of the table. The trick? To first convert the particle to a wave so that it easily passes to the other side and gains point for you. So, it’s kinda like air hockey, but it requires a bit more strategy and a bit less skill to “win” the game.
Having watched a number of videos, the thing that was totally “net new” to me was learning about the Higgs boson. Quick summary from the website on CERN:
You and everything around you are made of particles. But when the universe began, no particles had mass; they all sped around at the speed of light.
Stars, planets and life could only emerge because particles gained their mass from a fundamental field associated with the Higgs boson. The existence of this mass-giving field was confirmed in 2012, when the Higgs boson particle was discovered at CERN.
That was cool and something I had never heard of before today. Brent, Violet and I watched a few highlights of recent scientific breakthroughs in the movie theater and the more I watched, the more I wanted to learn. I truly was in my element today and I loved watching Violet’s eyes light up as various topics like dark matter, dark energy and quantum physics were discussed in detail. I think this picture about sums up our day today:
Violet and I squint into the sun as we capture this picture summarizing our day
Almost forgot to share. Brent treated us to lunch at the “Big Bang” cafe. Yes, that’s a perfect name for the cafe and each of their food items were named by their marketing department. I personally enjoyed Dark Energy Tea and the chocolate cake aptly named Dark Matter Cake.
CERN’s cafe where Brent, Violet and I had lunch & discussed quantum physics
Seriously a wonderful today today at CERN. Loved all the exploration and conversation that this place brought as well as the opportunity to visit the very first computer that started the World Wide Web in 1989. This is where it all started and where we continue to expand our understanding of space and time and so much of our universe and everything. What’s amazing to me is that CERN just celebrated its 70th anniversary (birthday?) last year as it was founded in 1954 with its main function to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research.
So much more has come out of this facility beyond particle accelerators and continues to innovate with more than 12,000 scientists across 70 countries. So happy to see this epicenter of science and technology.
