CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,

is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It is headquartered in Geneva.

So, what's the big deal? Have you seen the movie, Angels and Demons? Part of it was filmed at CERN. But of course, as in all movies, a tiny bit of truth was overblown into a fictional dramatization and declared "based on the truth." In reality, there are 6 major experiments being conducted there. They are basically looking for the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."

Most of you are probably aware that Joseph is a grad student at UCLA, studying particle physics. According to Joseph, this is where the most exciting research is being done in physics right now. So he is in Geneva, visiting CERN for the first time. He will return to UCLA July 3, spend two months studying for comps, and then return to CERN for about 4 years to work on his PhD. (I miss him already.)

The "God Particle" is so nicknamed as they are trying to simulate the Big Bang and hoping to detect the theoretical "particle or set of particles, that might give others mass..." (In other words, as I understand it, this would be the particle that turns energy into matter.)

"To look for the particle, researchers must smash other particles together at very high speeds. If the energy from that collision is high enough, it is converted into smaller bits of matter -- particles -- one of which could be a Higgs boson. The Higgs will only last for a small fraction of a second, and then decay into other particles. So in order to tell whether the Higgs appeared in the collision, researchers look for evidence of what it would have decayed into." (This is quoted from the CERN website.)

What follows is one of many images that Joseph's team is working on. Aren't you glad that it's Joseph that has to interpret this and not us?

I am not sure how it all fits together, but this is a link to an earlier brochure from CERN, for those who are interested in learning more about it: http://cdsmedia.cern.ch/img/CERN-Brochure-2008-002-Eng.pdf

PS. Interesting factoid. The WWW started at CERN 20 years ago.

(Also from the CERN website:
"Geneva, 13 March 2009. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee returned to the birthplace of his invention today, 20 years after submitting his paper ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ to his boss Mike Sendall. By writing the words ‘Vague, but exciting’ on the document’s cover, and giving Berners-Lee the go-ahead to continue, Sendall was signing into existence the information revolution of our times: the World Wide Web. In September of the following year, Berners-Lee took delivery of a computer called a NeXT cube, and by December the Web was up and running, albeit between just a couple of computers at CERN¹.")