“95% of the universe in still unknown,” Fabiola
Gianotti, the Director General of CERN, explained in a presentation to staff at
the World Economic Forum. “We are all driven by a shared passion for
knowledge.”
In other words, however sophisticated we imagine our age
of space exploration and self-driving cars to be, we are still staggeringly
ignorant about almost everything in the universe.
CERN wants to change that. It is a grandiose undertaking
that not only sheds light on the esoteric world of particle physics, but also
on international collaboration, purpose and progress.
In one of the
"marginal" theories, physicists suggest that the world's largest
atomic collider at CERN could be used as a time machine to send certain matter
into the past. Scientists point out that the LHC, a 17-mile-long particle
accelerator located underground near Geneva, could be used as a carrier for a
hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson in the past. Despite the
fact that there are many if in this process, such as. whether the Higgs boson
even exists, scientists are convinced of these possibilities. “Our theory is
pretty amazing, but it doesn’t violate any of the existing physical laws or
experimental possibilities,” physicist Tom Weiler of Venderbilt University said
in a statement. If the theory proves to be true, this method will be used to
send messages to the past, or even the future.
Weiler and Chui Man Ho
have already published a paper of the same name and the only issue is the
discovery of the Higgs boson.
Christine Sutton describes the pioneering 1956
experiment that proved the existence of the neutrino, and how subsequent
particle-beam experiments at CERN and elsewhere contributed to unearthing a
further two neutrino types.
Christine
Sutton describes the pioneering 1956 experiment that proved the existence of
the neutrino, and how subsequent particle-beam experiments at CERN and
elsewhere contributed to unearthing a further two neutrino types.
In July 1956, in a brief paper
published in Science, a small team
based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US presented results from an
experiment at a new, powerful fission reactor at the Savannah River Plant, in
South Carolina. The work, they wrote, "verifies the neutrino hypothesis
suggested by Pauli". Clyde Cowan, Fred Reines, Kiko Harrison, Herald Kruse
and Austin McGuire had demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to
detect neutrinos, setting in motion the new field of neutrino physics. The key
ingredients were an intense source and a big detector, with more than a touch
of ingenuity and patience.
More than two decades previously,
in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli had proposed that the "energy crisis" in
nuclear beta decay – presented by the continuous energy spectrum of the emitted
electron – would be solved if the decaying nucleus also emitted a second,
undetected particle. This would allow the energy released to be shared between
three objects, including the recoiling nucleus, and so yield electrons with a
range of energies, just as observed. The new particle had to be neutral and
have a relatively small mass. Pauli called his proposal "a desperate
remedy", in part because he thought that if such a particle did indeed
exist, then it "would probably have long ago been seen".
This article was
originally published in the July/August 2016 issue of the CERN Courier.
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