Word: cern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Anyone who has struggled to change a fuse in their home should pity the scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Last Friday, just nine days after celebrating the successful test run of the largest particle accelerator ever constructed, a tiny electrical connection between two magnets overheated and caused a minor meltdown...
...however, repair work can't begin because the machine is still too cold; it will take about a month to warm up the area to a temperature at which replacement parts can be inserted. It will take another month to cool it back down, and given that CERN has pledged not to run its giant machine - which requires as much power as the entire city of Geneva - during winter months when Europe's energy needs are highest, Friday's breakdown could delay the actual smashing of atoms until early next year...
...same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the Big Bang, the very beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens...
...discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "Its research program has the potential to change our view of the universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that's as old as mankind itself." (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...driving principle behind the CERN experiment - and indeed physics itself - is that despite its vast and complex appearance, the universe is actually ordered, rational and elegant. Every major breakthrough in physics has shown the cosmos to conform to mathematical equations so symmetrical and satisfying they can only be described as beautiful. (Physics have christened two of the particles they will study at CERN as "truth" and "beauty," after a Keats poem that suggests the two are interchangeable...