Google Street View Lets You Take a Virtual Tour of CERN

ORIGINAL: FastCo

BY: Kit Eaton

Now CERN has graciously opened its doors to Google's Street View.

GOOGLE NOW OFFERS YOU A PEEP INTO THE MACHINE THAT'S PROBING THE SECRETS OF THE BIG BANG AND HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS. IT'S COLORFUL!

You may think Google's engineers are smart, but they're rather outclassed by the small town's worth of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians who populate CERN, Europe's amazing research facility that's home to the Large Hadron Collider. Now CERN has graciously opened its doors to Google's Street View. This means that you, too can take a walk around the rooms and structures where scientists are trying to unravel the secrets of everything.

CERN-Atlas - Photo: Google

CERN is enormous, so it took the Street View team about two weeks to image the whole thing back in 2011. The image archives are extensive as a result, letting you walk around the curving tunnels that contain the particle accelerator at the heart of the LHC and even to peep at the various experiments inserted in its beam, including the ones used to find the Higgs boson.

CERN - Large Hadron Collider tunnel. Photo: Google

It's the sort of facility that you will find fascinating--your writer has long dreamed of visiting, having been lucky enough to spend hundreds of hours strolling around a mere 100-meter synchrotron, a small toy compared to the LHC. Once you've enjoyed peeping at CERN, why don't you do a little reading about what goes on there?

[Images: Google]