Whether we like it or not, there’s no doubt that the World Wide Web (aka the Internet) has changed the way we live, work and communicate. And it all started here – at Cern, commonly known as the place where they smash really tiny pieces of the universe together. The ultimate research facility for physicists, Cern stands for the European Organization for Nuclear Research and we went for a visit last weekend since it’s only 20minutes away from Geneva.
While it’s commonly known to many as a research hub for scientists interested in studying the origins of the universe, it’s also a place where a lot of new technology and innovations happen to facilitate this studying. Most of the most well-known ‘discoveries’ is the WWW. The concept of the Web was originally used to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. The Web has now grown into something that most of us can’t live without – whether its Facebooking, using your mobile phone, paying your bills, or anything that requires the collection and transferring of data, it’s become a necessity. Now I just hope that we can generate enough energy/electricity to keep this going!
I was told by our tour guide that it costs about $15 million every year just for electricity at Cern to run all the different experiments and the facility!
This is a half-scale size of Alice, A Large Ion Collider Experiment, one of the largest experiments in the world devoted to research in the physics of matter at an infinitely small scale. It’s about 100 metres below ground.
Lots of different experiments go on at Cern and this is one of the ones our guide showed us on a more personal tour of the Cern facilities. While Alice (above) is about doing massive experiments colliding small particles, this is an experiment on a smaller scale looking at creating anti-matter.