A particle physics evening
By Oli Usher, on 29 August 2014
Particle physics is a particularly abstruse area of science. The phenomena studied are so different from what we know and see that it is incredibly hard to convey even the most basic concepts.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the past few years have seen an explosion in public interest in particle physics. The construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN a decade ago was one trigger for this – and the LHC’s triumphant discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 only confirmed the discipline’s popularity.
UCL is a major participant in the LHC (witness the 24 UCL authors of one of the papers that confirmed the discovery of the Higgs particle). Last week saw the BOOST conference, an international workshop for particle physicists at UCL. A group of them held a public event (A Particle Physics Evening, 20 August) hosted by UCL’s head of physics, Jon Butterworth.
The evening featured various talks on CERN and particle physics, including a live linkup with the CERN control room. (Unusually, given how flaky the technology usually is, the video-conferencing worked flawlessly. This is just as well – any networking problems would have been embarrassing given the world wide web was invented at CERN and UCL had the UK’s first connection to the internet.).