Google Street View - A tour of CERN: I had to put this as the main image for this post just because I wondered what this woman swimming through the electrical wires tells people she does for a living at dinner parties. Click the image of the swimming lady (left) to be directed to Google's Maps. Then type in 'CERN' and click 'Street View'. Summary: Between 1998-2008 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is the largest scientific experiment in history and is the highest-energy particle collider. It is a collaboration between over 10,000 scientists and engineers, 100 countries and hundreds of universities. The UK has a lead role as we currently work on all of the experiments, with Professor Brian Cox being one of them. It is 100 metres underground in Geneva Switzerland, weighs in excess of 38,000 tonnes and its circular structure runs for 27km (about 27 airport runways). The LHC was build to test conditions just after the Big Bang. It uses hydrogen particles, as they were the only matter present in the early universe, and strips them of their electrons, runs them to 99.9% of the speed of light (light = 671 million mph) and then smashes them into one another. Supercomputers then observe the collision, what particles are thrown off, their temperature etc. Scientists had hoped by doing this that they would falsify (prove, or disprove) the existence of the elusive Higgs boson which gives mass to subatomic particles by their interaction with the Higgs field. The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed by the LHC on 14th March 2013. To understand more about the LHC, the Higgs boson and the Higgs field view the short videos below which explain their subject very well in 6 and 3 minutes respectively. - A link to LHC's website: http://www.lhc.ac.uk How the LHC works - video This video is fantastic at explaining what happens inside the LHC in basic terms, in just 6 minutes. If I were to write it all down, it would not be anywhere near as interesting as seeing it visualised. Enjoy! Time: 6:16 Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc Click the image (left) to be directed to this video. What is a Higgs boson? - video A very short video simply explaining what the Higgs boson and Higgs field are. As it turns out, it's very much like you swimming in a swimming pool. Who would have thought. Time: 3:27 Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIg1Vh7uPyw Click the image (left) to be directed to this video. HD images of the LHC at CERN:
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Alainah Rook
BA Criminology & Sociology
University of Kent Third year undergraduate Twitter: Alainah_NTR E-mail: [email protected] kent.academia.edu/AlainahR Archives
July 2014
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