Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Geneva, Switzerland and visit CERN; the European Centre for Nuclear Research, an establishment renowned and esteemed for its pioneering contributions to the world of science and technology-responsible for the development of the internet and most recently, the discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
CERN is constituted of a variety of experiments, laboratories and impressive feats of engineering. It’s most prestigious icon the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 km long elliptical tube buried 100m underground, featuring two high energy proton beams which travel at 99.9991% of the speed of light in opposite directions, eventually colliding at specified points at which the experiments are constructed around.
The scientists at CERN are focussing on various objectives: investigating the nature of dark matter which according to the current theories suggests the existence of a possible 11 dimensions rather than the standard 4 (12 if there are two time dimensions), super gravity and super symmetry particles and also the unexplained reduction of antimatter in the universe. They do this by accelerating particles at the highest speeds, and therefore energies, possible and colliding them to create the conditions just yoctoseconds after the Hot Big Bang – it should be noted here that the speed of light is unreachable due to the exponential increase of mass when approaching the speed light which therefore causes the energy needed to accelerate the mass to reach infinity (infinite energy being an obvious impossibility). The result of these collisions is multiple decays, annihilations and pair production incidents.
With the detector recording over 40 million collisions every second it takes the combined effort of thousands of scientists from all over the globe. Being a source of revolutionary enhancements in the fields of mathematics, computer programming, physics, engineering and cryogenics, CERN is the epitome of human advancement.
Having the chance to speak with the scientists who work there, to see the LHC tunnel and the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN has given me a firmer impression of where I would like to be in the future. It was a fantastic experience and I hope that one day I can return to CERN to study or even work there.
Joseph Aziz
Year 11 AG&T Triple Scientist
Bosworth Academy