The universe has been explored at Cern for 70 years
Published: Sunday, Sep 29th 2024, 09:40
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For 70 years, researchers at Cern in Geneva have been tackling the big questions of the universe. On September 29, 1954, seven of the then twelve member states ratified the agreement establishing the "Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire" (Cern).
The research center was thus officially founded. With the new research center, the founders wanted to stop the brain drain to the USA that had begun during the Second World War, as Cern writes on its website. It was important to them to promote peaceful research. "The organization does not engage in work for military purposes," stated the ratified agreement establishing Cern. Instead, the discoveries made at Cern were to be made generally accessible.
Since that moment, Cern's core business has been nothing less than the exploration of the universe. "Our work here will help to find out what the universe is made of and how it works," says Cern. For example, physicists at Cern are trying to find out what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe.
The discovery of the Higgs particle
To simulate the state immediately after the Big Bang, researchers collide protons or ions with high energy in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With its 27-kilometre-long, ring-shaped tunnel 100 meters underground in the Swiss-French border region, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world.
On July 4, 2012, one of these experiments succeeded in detecting the Higgs boson. This discovery caused a worldwide stir at Cern. Researchers had been searching for the particle for decades. In the 1960s, researchers Peter Higgs, François Englert and Robert Brout proposed the Higgs particle in theory to explain why other elementary particles have mass. According to the model, the universe is permeated by a Higgs field that slows down other particles. If the existence of the Higgs particle had been ruled out, the physicists' entire explanatory model of the basic structure of matter would have been on the brink of collapse.
How the Internet was created at Cern
Almost as a by-product of this basic research, a number of things were created in Geneva that everyone can feel in their everyday lives. For example, Cern is the birthplace of the "World Wide Web" (WWW). The British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 to simplify the exchange of information between scientists at universities and institutes around the world. The world's first website was info.cern.ch. In April 1993, Cern made the program code of the World Wide Web (WWW) available to the public.
In addition, technologies that were originally developed for particle physics were used in medicine. Positron emission tomography (PET), for example. PET scans are used in medicine to visualize cells or tissue that consume a lot of energy, including inflamed or tumour tissue.
The materials and processes developed at Cern for experiments also include particularly powerful solar panels and touch screen technology.
©Keystone/SDA
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