The word CERN may sound familiar to you. It is where the World Wide Web was invented, whose original purpose was to solve the problem of connecting large amounts of information and making it accessible to physicists worldwide.Thus it is only fitting that our Innovation of the Week story comes from there. Today, at CERN physicists are recreating the Big Bang, and studying anew the interaction of the building blocks of matter.
While subatomic particles such as electrons and protons are very small, the devices used to study them are rather large. Consider ATLAS: the particle detector, still mid-construction, is about 45 meters long, more than 25 meters high, and weights about 7,000 tons. It was first imagined in 1994, and some 2,000 scientists and engineers from three dozen countries have been building it since January, 2003. Starting this November, ATLAS will observe and measure the collisions of minuscule beams of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light inside a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collider is under construction at CERN, the largest particle-physics lab in the world, located near Geneva, Switzerland.
The work of scientists is really interesting! They either invent or discover new things, debunk a theory and offer an alternative, or recreate major theories such as Big Bang.
Source:
BusinessWeek.com, “A Big Bang… of Innovation”
