Public Lecture—Smashing Protons: First Physics at the LHC

Lecture Date: Tuesday, November 30, 2010. The Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest scientific instrument ever built. For nearly a year now, we have been smashing protons into each other with unprecedented energy, allowing us to peer into nature's most intimate depths. The world's largest and most complex cameras take snapshots of these collisions millions of times per second. These pictures reveal the smallest components of the universe - the quarks and gluons - and, someday, we hope, the elusive Higgs boson. Why do we need to build such an enormous machine in order to study particles more than a million times smaller than a speck of dust? This lecture will explain how the LHC and its detectors work, what the pictures from the LHC are telling us now, and how we will use this technology to explore the deepest secrets of the universe. Lecturer: David Miller, SLAC.

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Science & Technology

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[happinesson]

never ending collision of protons! i have watched a hundred of videos about smashing of protons..when are you going to stop?

[SLAC]

@happinesson perhaps when it stops being scientifically useful :)

[boodistGeek]

This guy talks a lot, but manages to say little. Dude. Get to the point. Stop trying to sound so clever. Speakers should inform their audience, not drone on about peripheral material.

[kurtilein3]

a really great talk :)

good introduction, and gives some insight on what they are doing at the LHC right now

[kurtilein3]

@55t1

until there is solid experimental data, there always tend to be several theories competing. finding a new particle and measuring its properties will kill most of these conpeting theories, and maybe one turns out to potentially be right. Basically, the theoretical physicists are working ahead of the experimentalists.

[55t1]

I have heard and read articles, that say that there is a competing theory to the Higgs mechanism called Top quark condensate. The top/anti-top pair is responsible for the masses of the observed particles.