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During the October 2007 half term I had the privilege of accompanying about 30 physics teachers from the London area on a visit to CERN, near Geneva. All of us went especially to see the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to start up next year, but discovered a good deal more.
The highlight of our visit was a tour of one of the LHC detectors, Atlas, a machine of staggering size and complexity, every last bit of it hand-built. When the LHC operates, two beams of protons - each circling within the 27 km LHC ring, near the speed of light - will cross over in the heart of ATLAS. About 100 million read-out channels will then collect data from 40 million beam-beam collisions per second. Its filtering systems are designed to select 100 interesting events a second out of 600 million others. A global computing GRID system will store 10 000 million events a year from the LHC's four experiments, enabling researchers all over the world to share and analyse data.
The CERN complex is the 21st century equivalent of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Both of these extraordinary human achievements result from unusually effective social organisations. What struck me as the second most impressive sight at CERN was the crowded cafeteria that provides thousands of high-quality meals three times daily to people from all over the world. CERN currently brings together scientists, engineers and a skilled workforce to plan, create and assemble every sub-system that together is becoming an enormous, integrated machine - the LHC.
In 1949, the French physicist and Nobel prize-winner Louis de Broglie proposed the creation of a European science laboratory. CERN was born in 1954, with an explicit aim of bringing together, through science, nationalities that had recently been at war with each other. Its main function is to provide the infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research, a quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. There are now 20 member countries, plus another six countries with ‘observer status’. Over 100 nationalities are represented among the user community.
While journeying to and from CERN by train, I read Edward Teller’s autobiography. Teller devoted much of his life to weapons research, and is remembered particularly for the hydrogen bomb and SDI, Reagan’s ‘star wars’ defence system. Discovering CERN’s commitment to peace, openness and internationalism provided the perfect antidote to Teller’s life story.
CERN is a ‘big science’ project that has a history of inspiring new generations of scientists, engineers ... and teachers. Long may it thrive.
Participants were grateful to the Science Learning Centre London for organising the trip and to the London Development Agency for funding it.
©The Nuffield Foundation 2003