CERNland: a new virtual theme park
The celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web (Happy 20th birthday, World Wide Web) saw the public release of a new website for young people: CERNland has been developed to bring the excitement of CERN's research to a young audience aged between 7 and 12 with a range of films, games and multimedia applications.
CERNland is designed to teach children about CERN's research in an interactive way. It contains information about CERN, several videos and nine different games on themes as varied as the LHC, the CERN Control Centre, antimatter and even the restaurant. The main goal is to get children playing so that they will get to know about the research being done at CERN through the games and interactive activities. Users do not require any particle-physics expertise but those who click on the information links will be better placed to answer the questions and improve their scores. As with many real theme parks there is no real age limit to enjoying CERNland: anyone can follow SuperBob round the LHC or try building atoms by collecting electrons, protons and neutrons.
Young people are an important audience for CERN because there is an increasing demand for a physics-literate graduate population, which is being compounded with falling enrolment in physics courses at university level. CERNland aims to attract youngsters before they begin to make decisions that will influence their future career paths. The site has been developed with the help of professional educators and assisted by some of the young people in the age group that it has been designed to reach. Their input has been incorporated into the site's design.
"Society needs more physicists across a range of industries," said CERN's director-general Rolf Heuer at the launch, "and the way to attract young people into physics is to engage them early with the kind of discovery-science that we do here at CERN, addressing some of the most fundamental questions about our universe."
• To visit CERNland, see www.cern.ch/cernland.
Higgs meets his likeness in Edinburgh
At a special event at the Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh on 2 March the principal, Tim O'Shea, unveiled a new portrait of Peter Higgs by the artist Ken Currier. Higgs is professor emeritus at Edinburgh, where he has been since he was appointed lecturer in 1960.
The event celebrated the work of Higgs, of "Higgs boson" fame, and the work of Ken Currie, one of Scotland's most influential artists. The portrait depicts the physicist in a contemplative mood, as scientists around the world are preparing to resume the search for the eponymous particle at the LHC.
There were also two talks at the event, one by Tom Normand, senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews on "Ken Currie – themes, subjects, and portraits 1985–2008". For the second talk, Richard Kenway, head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Edinburgh, invited John Ellis of CERN to give the 2009 Robin Schlapp Lecture on "To Higgs or not to Higgs".
The night was made all the more special for Higgs by the presence of many of his friends and colleagues from the days of the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics, where he did his pivotal work, as well as the current members of the particle-physics theory group.