What’s this CERN Large Hadron Collier Podcast thing all about then?
Let’s take it a word at a time..
CERN: European Council for Nuclear Research (yes that would be ECNR in English but when in Switzerland do as the French do.)
Large: As in ‘It’s Big’. A 27 km circular tunnel 150 metres underground spanning the France/Switzerland border, around which are six detectors, it will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Hadron : A sub atomic nuclear particle, like a proton or neutron
Collider: Bangs together. In this case, protons traveling at a gnat’s whisker under the speed of light one way, colliding with protons traveling in the opposite direction.
Podcast: It’s a series of chat shows that gets delivered fresh to your computer.
So – take the biggest experiment in the history of the universe (well, this universe anyway). Take some well known people from all sorts of walks of life. Take a former keyboard player from D:Ream. Mix them altogether for half an hour or so ‘et viola’ as they say in Switzerland, serve up a cocktail of entertaining chat shows with a bit of particle physics thrown in. And you wouldn’t get that on Channel 4 would you?
Professor Brian Cox (for it was he on those keyboards at the Labour Election celebrations in 1997) is a particle physicist and part of the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Over the coming months leading up to the gradual ‘switching-on’ of the LHC, we’ll be inviting some of our media chums to see CERN and the LHC for themselves, and through their eyes and questions we’ll all be able to experience this totally awesome experiment and the most important science project of the 21st Century.
Here are some of the questions that the Large Hadron Collider aims to help answer over the coming years.
– What is Mass?
– What are dark matter and dark energy?
– Why is there so little anti-matter and so much matter? And does it matter?
– Does the so-called ‘God Particle’, the Higgs Boson, exist?
– Are there extra dimensions as suggested by String Theory?
Funded by those lovely people at the Science and Technology Facilities Council and produced by those poncy podcasty media types yada-yada.
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