Collide – a cultural revolution
Would you employ me to run the LHC? Or perhaps to run an experiment at CERN with antimatter? After all, I have an abiding interest in physics – ever since an inspiring science teacher sparked my...
CERN – the knowledge hub
If you ask 10 people working at CERN how they would describe what CERN is in a single sentence, the chances are that you will get 10 different answers. Most people think of CERN, first and f...
Profiting from the long view
We can measure and analyse accumulated superconducting RF (SRF) operating experience in broad, high-level terms using the “cryomodule century”, or CC. Ten cryomodules operating for a decad...
the queen of all sciences and Intelligent Design
In the mid-1930s, physics was heavily attacked by the most famous Italian philosopher of the time, who called physicists “vile mechanicians”. It was on this occasion that Enrico Fermi told...
Big Science, bigger outreach
In 1609 Galileo Galilei made the first recorded telescope observations of the night sky – an event that is being celebrated all through 2009 in the International Year of Astronomy. He soon ran i...
The age of citizen cyberscience
I first met Rytis Slatkevicius in 2006, when he was 18. At the time, he had assembled the world’s largest database of prime numbers. He had done this by harnessing the spare processing power of ...
SRF technology comes full circle
Nearly a half-century ago, researchers at Stanford University began investigating superconducting RF (SRF) acceleration. They would not have been surprised to learn that by 1994, SRF had come int...
Will the LHC surprise us?
Will the LHC surprise us? I hope so. Having failed to find any completely unexpected new physics for more than 30 years, we clearly need nature’s help to progress, and the case is good. The...
Will the LHC reveal the unexpected?
This autumn, commissioning should be in full swing on the LHC at CERN, the world’s largest laboratory for the study of subnuclear physics. So it is entirely appropriate that the 46th Course of t...
A vision for the future of CERN
CERN is a de facto global laboratory, with the LHC set to be the centre of particle-physics research for a decade or more, and comprises the largest scientific user community in the world. More t...