This morning I woke up at 6AM, had a shower and breakfast, dressed up, and rushed out in the cold of the fading night to catch a train to Mestre, where my car was parked. From there I drove due north for two hours, to a place in the mountains called Pieve di Cadore. A comfortable ride in normal weather, but this morning the weather was horrible, with an insisting water bombing from above which slowly turned to heavy sleet as I gained altitude. The drive was very unnerving as my car is old and not well equipped for these winter conditions - hydroplaning was frequent. But I made it.
The place was the high school "Enrico Fermi" - a scientific lyceum hosted in a modern wooden building just outside the town of Pieve. As I treaded my way in the sleet, hit by heavy rain and soaked wet, I thought to myself that maybe -just maybe- I could have spent my time better if I had stayed home (it's a Saturday after all!), waking up late, and then leisurely correcting the PhD thesis of Alberto, the graduate student I am tutoring, who's about to defend his work. 

That thought quickly vanished as I learned that the seminar I was about to give had been expressly organized by the students themselves, who were "self-managing" the school that day, with lectures they had set up by inviting a few people willing to teach them topics of their liking. That's the bottom-ups approach to science outreach I like - when the demand comes directly from the final users.

In the end, over sixty students crowded the smallish "physics lab" room where I held my lesson. I knew I only had one hour to explain them what it is that we do with those giant underground machines in Geneva and elsewhere. That was not hard though, as over the years I have perfected a lesson which is stimulating yet complex as much as allowed by the level of the audience (16- to 18-year-old students). There was half an hour of explanation of how we came to understand what are the real building blocks of matter, and the rest was spent discussing what is the Higgs boson, why it was predicted 50 years ago, and what it took to discover it. Plus a look at what may lie beyond, of course.

As this was a self-organized event, indeed the students appeared more interested on the topic than what I observe on average when I give the same speech to high school audiences. After my lecture a concert was scheduled downstairs as the last hour of "lesson", but many students lingered around to ask me questions on the matter, on how to become a physicist, etcetera. As I finally took off and stepped back into the sleet, with another unnerving two-hour drive waiting for me, I decided this had not been time wasted after all. Proselitism requires patience, devotion, and self-sacrifice ;-)

The slides I showed at the lecture can be downloaded here. Note that there are two embedded videos which won't load as they point to some location of my hard drive - I can send those upon request, but they can also be accessed through the CERN web site (the first is a layer-by-layer three-dimensional view of the CMS detector, inside-out; the second is a "slow-motion" proton-proton collision yielding four muons from Higgs -> ZZ decay).