5 of the best geek holidays

Geneva, Switzerland

Head to the land of watches, chocolate and secretive banking practices and you can drop by CERN, the world’s largest particle physics research laboratory, which is located on the outskirts of Geneva. CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the 27km-long underground circular tunnel smashing atoms together at high speeds in an attempt to discover the Higgs boson (or create a black hole that will eat the Earth, if you believe some people).

Sadly you can’t visit the LHC itself, but there are permanent exhibitions in CERN’s surface buildings, and you can book a three-hour guided tour consisting of an introduction, film screening and a visit to an experiment and/or a smaller accelerator. Either visit is free.