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Episode 27 – Dr. Florian Goertz
CERN is the razor’s bleeding edge of frontier science; these experiments quite possibly will give mankind a perspective into the nature of reality as we’ve never before understood or seen.
CERN or (in french: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) is the The European Organization for Nuclear Research and what the scientists at CERN happen to be doing is indubitably going to change scientific theory as we understand it.
In the mid 1960’s a particle physicist named Peter Higgs, came up with an idea that there may be a particle floating around that we could observe. CERN has effectively built the machine necessary to find this elusive particle and went on to prove that theory by finding what is now known as the Higgs Boson.
This feat is by no means small, CERN is the largest laboratory in the world – it spans two countries and runs in a tunnel 27 kilometers round and 175 meters deep; beneath the French and Swiss Boarder near Geneva Switzerland. it’s also credited with birthing the internet.
The aim of the LHC is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high energy physics like – the standard model and other newer particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.
In this episode we speak with Dr. Florian Goertz who is part of the theory division at CERN – a highly interesting individual with one of the most interesting jobs on the planet.
You can find the experiments being conducted with the LHC here: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/experiments
CERN:
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 21 member states.
Antimatter:
In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation that combined quantum theory and special relativity to describe the behavior of an electron moving at a relativistic speed. The equation – which won Dirac the Nobel prize in 1933(link is external) – posed a problem: just as the equation x2=4 can have two possible solutions (x=2 or x=-2), so Dirac’s equation could have two solutions, one for an electron with positive energy, and one for an electron with negative energy. But classical physics (and common sense) dictated that the energy of a particle must always be a positive number.
Dirac interpreted the equation to mean that for every particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. For the electron there should be an “anti-electron”, for example, identical in every way but with a positive electric charge.
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CERN is the razor’s bleeding edge of frontier science; these experiments quite possibly will give mankind a perspective into the nature of reality as we’ve never before understood or seen.
CERN or (in french: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) is the The European Organization for Nuclear Research and what the scientists at CERN happen to be doing is indubitably going to change scientific theory as we understand it.
In the mid 1960’s a particle physicist named Peter Higgs, came up with an idea that there may be a particle floating around that we could observe. CERN has effectively built the machine necessary to find this elusive particle and went on to prove that theory by finding what is now known as the Higgs Boson.
This feat is by no means small, CERN is the largest laboratory in the world – it spans two countries and runs in a tunnel 27 kilometers round and 175 meters deep; beneath the French and Swiss Boarder near Geneva Switzerland. it’s also credited with birthing the internet.
The aim of the LHC is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high energy physics like – the standard model and other newer particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.
In this episode we speak with Dr. Florian Goertz who is part of the theory division at CERN – a highly interesting individual with one of the most interesting jobs on the planet.
You can find the experiments being conducted with the LHC here: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/experiments
CERN:
At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 21 member states.
Antimatter:
In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation that combined quantum theory and special relativity to describe the behavior of an electron moving at a relativistic speed. The equation – which won Dirac the Nobel prize in 1933(link is external) – posed a problem: just as the equation x2=4 can have two possible solutions (x=2 or x=-2), so Dirac’s equation could have two solutions, one for an electron with positive energy, and one for an electron with negative energy. But classical physics (and common sense) dictated that the energy of a particle must always be a positive number.
Dirac interpreted the equation to mean that for every particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. For the electron there should be an “anti-electron”, for example, identical in every way but with a positive electric charge.