CERN: How One Organization is Pushing the Boundaries of Physics

 

Its primary mission is to research the fundamental particles that make up the universe and investigate their interactions with one another and the world around them. Over 1,600 scientists from over 100 countries have conducted experiments at CERN over the years, leading to some incredible discoveries that continue to impact science today and push the boundaries of physics into the future.

 

Why it Matters

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has been pushing our understanding of physics to its limits. It continues to be a hotbed for scientific discovery. An American physicist won last year’s Nobel Prize in physics for his work on particle detection at LHC. The LHC is used as a tool to find new particles and better understand how particles interact with each other.

 

The History of CERN

CERN’s story begins in 1954 when 12 European countries decided to create a particle physics laboratory and named it after their acronym for Coordinating Committee for Nuclear Research. The first machine at CERN was called the bubble chamber, and it allowed physicists to trace subatomic particles as they moved through a gas-filled device.

 

Scientists at Work

CERN was founded in 1954 by 12 European countries with a mission to study fundamental particles and forces. CERN operates on a $10 billion budget. It operates at a particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—which reaches peak capacity around 100 million times per second. The LHC is a massive circular underground tunnel, about 17 miles in circumference, situated 100 feet below ground near Geneva, Switzerland.

 

Big Experiments

This year, CERN scientists produced even more astounding results. Earlier in 2015, for example, they announced that a neutrino (an electrically neutral subatomic particle) had been sent from CERN in Geneva to a lab at Gran Sasso National Laboratory over seven hundred miles away.

 

What We've Learned

CERN’s LHC (Large Hadron Collider) project has been running various groundbreaking experiments, none more famous than their recreation of the early moments following The Big Bang. This project has led to an explosion in new scientific knowledge and pushed us further into our understanding of physics and beyond. CERN’s main goal is simple: understand everything in our universe.

 

Why Should I Care?

Why should you, or anyone else, care about what’s going on at CERN? These experiments may help us understand how our universe was formed and how it might end. And that’s certainly something worth caring about. But there are other reasons as well. Those who work at CERN are pushing human ingenuity to its limits to better understand our physical world.

 

For Further Reading

CERN offers a wealth of resources on its website, including information about careers, technologies, and experiments. If you’re curious to learn more about particle physics—and how technology advances are being used in fields beyond CERN—I recommend reading some books from renowned physicist and author Brian Cox. Why Does E=mc2? Takes an approachable look at relativity, while The Quantum Universe gives a well-written overview of quantum mechanics.