Clifton High School students enjoy their Physics A level trip to Switzerland
Our Physics A level students participated in the first Clifton High School trip to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN between Wednesday 18th October 2023 and Friday 20th October 2023.
Flying from Bristol to Geneva, the students visited the UN Headquarters and witnessed a live debate, went on a boat trip on Lake Geneva, explored the city before visiting CERN for a guided tour, all before enjoying a lunch with a number of scientists. This purposeful trip to CERN was enlightening for our Physics students and amongst other topics, involved learning about antimatter and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is our intention to host this as a biennial trip to ensure every student reading A level Physics has an opportunity to attend, with the next proposed date being October 2025.
We extend our thanks to Ms Atkins, Dr Caddy and Mrs Lynch for ensuring such a successful trip and also our gratitude to our friends at CERN for facilitating this hugely informative trip.
The response to the trip from our student body included:
"Very enjoyable and motivational to study further physics."
"I found it amazing. We watched a video and had an introduction talk. We then had a tour and leant about radiation and how they track the radiation they have been exposed to. I found it very informative and it was a lovely experience."
"The particles in the hadron collider travel at 99.9% of the speed of light. Antimatter is matter with the opposite charge. Antimatter and matter cancel each other out and this should have happened after the Big Bang because there was presumably the same amount of antimatter that there was of matter yet this didn’t happen. CERN is trying to find out why. Even with all the antimatter than CERN had created, it wouldn’t be enough to boil a cup of tea so there is no risk of it cancelling all the matter in the world out."
"a super fun trip from start to finish and jam-packed with exciting things to do" "it was definitely a great length of time away" "we had the opportunity to witness a genuine debate and gain insights into the functioning of the UN"
