CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. It is home the Large Hydron Collider, or LHC and many top research institutions. CERN's other claim to fame is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who started working on the concept of the Internet while he was working at CERN. Eventually however Berners-Lee left the physics world for Boston and Cambridge, where he further nutured his idea into reality. Nowadays CERN's computing center has turned its focus on grids to help process and share the immense volumes of data collected during the experiments.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
In 1999 an large international team of engineers, physicists, and artisans started building the LHC in an already existing 27km tunnel (previously used for another big thing). In late 2008 the LHC was finished and experiments began. The LHC covers the Geneva countryside but you can't easily see it because it's 100m below ground! Measuring 27km in circumference, it is really long. So what does it do? It re-creates the conditions that were present at a millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
A huge number of smart people work at CERN on the following four main experiments. I'm probably boring most of you to death...so I won't go into too much detail.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
Has 2500 scientifiques; with a team of 37 pays
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). Experiments that search for "dark matter" the void around the planets and galaxies that stops planets/galaxies from flying apart and into one another. We can only see 4% of the universe while the rest is made of dark matter; the CMS detector weighs more than Eiffel Tower.
Has 2500 scientists; with a team of 38 countries
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). Another experiment studying "dark matter".
Has 1000 scientists; with a team of 30 countries
LHCb (LHC beauty quarks)
Has 700 scientists; with a team of 15 countries
Other smaller experiements include TOTEM and LHCf. Totem watches over the funtioning of the LHC machine, measuring the quality of the proton beam created by the LHC. LHCf detects ultra high energy particles spraying from the LHC collisions. Other interesting things I learned. I'm not an expert here, so again, search the web to dig deeper.
Powers of Ten
On the largest scale picture ever taken (at 10 to the 26th meters), there are 9, 325 points on the picture with each point a galaxy like ours! Can you imagine this? Stephen Hawking, in a recently made documentary, is asked whether humankind should be trying to make contact with others out there. Hawking in response says it's not a matter if aliens exist in other galaxies because mathematically they must exist.
Timeline
- 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to our universe
- 300, 000 years after the BB, the first atoms were formed
- 1 billion years after the BB, the first galaxies formed
- 4 billions ago, planet Earth was formed from debris orbiting the Sun, our nearest star
- 3 million years ago, humankind evolved and the first humanoids walked on our Earth
Four Forces of Physics
- Gravity, the weakest of the 4 forces but without it, we would float into space! Gravity pulls matter together.
- Strong force. There could be no life without the strong force. Most powerful of the 4 forces. Carbon is synthesized in stars via SF.
- Electromagnetism keeps us solid; during thunderstorms, charge builds up in clouds then runs to Earth as lightening; Aurora Borealis; mobile phones use these waves.
- Weak force—without this, the sun won't shine; WF causes beta decay, a form of radioactivity that triggers nuclear fission in the heart of the sun. There's naturally occurring radioactivity in granite rocks.
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