7 things you didn’t know about CERN and the strange world of particle physics
Four years after the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, the world’s biggest science experiment is still seeking to unlock the mysteries of our universe.
On the outskirts of Geneva, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) mimics the aftermath of the Big Bang by sending beams of protons hurtling into one another at close to the speed of light.
Despite jubilation in the physics community when the Higgs was detected in 2012 – and public relief that the experiment didn’t suck the whole world into a gaping wormhole – there remains a lot to discover.
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“95% of the universe in still unknown,” Fabiola Gianotti, the Director General of CERN, explained in a presentation to staff at the World Economic Forum. “We are all driven by a shared passion for knowledge.”
In other words, however sophisticated we imagine our age of space exploration and self-driving cars to be, we are still staggeringly ignorant about almost everything in the universe.
CERN wants to change that. It is a grandiose undertaking that not only sheds light on the esoteric world of particle physics, but also on international collaboration, purpose and progress.
Surprising facts about CERN’s ambitious projects
As the Romanian flag is raised for the first time this week to mark the arrival of CERN’s 22nd member state, here are some startling facts about Europe’s most ambitious scientific project.
Smashing: A simulation of protons colliding in the Large Hadron ColliderImage: CERN
1. The Large Hadron Collider is colder than outer space
To be precise, it’s 1.9 K (-271.3°C), almost absolute zero. A cryogenic cooling system keeps it this frigid for the sake of the superconductor electromagnets, which send proton beams hurtling towards one another in a loop 100 metres below the ground.
You too would need help keeping cool if you were propelling bursts of 200,000 billion protons around a 27km ring at a rate of 11,000 times a second. Beams of protons hurtle around the ring in opposite directions until they collide with such force that they generate myriad sub-atomic particles – including the Higgs Boson. A set of gargantuan detectors then crunch some of the data from 40 million collisions a second.
