An Inside Look at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Part I

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

In this first part, of two (second part will be up soon) we meet Dr. Frank E. Taylor, a senior research scientist at MIT who is now working at CERN on their new Large Hadron Collider. This is a huge machine, 27 kilometers long, that is expected to do major scientific work over the next few years, including finding the Higgs Boson particle. The Higgs is also called the God particle, which is responsible for mass. At least that’s the theory. He talks about the ATLAS detector, Taylor works on the Muon System, which is a component of the Atlas experiment. This is also the birthplace of the Web, without which you wouldn’t be able to watch this video about the LHC.

 

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Hey, why not record your own video response on Youtube - and insert the url here.
Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on April 27, 2008 6:03 AM

This was so very informative. I had to rush from the house because my kitchen burst into flames, I forgot to take the kettle off the stove. I have cancelled my membership with ACM and IEEE, I can now get all my technical information from Fastcompany.

We have spent the children's college fund. They don't need to go. I have gotten them RSS feed subscriptions to this site.

Really the best. Watch out MIT and Wikipedia, here comes Fastcompany!

Posted by Ryan (not verified) on April 26, 2008 3:00 AM

You think Fast Company could afford a decent CDN, the latency on the video is painful.

Posted by Disgruntled (not verified) on April 24, 2008 8:13 PM

Nevermind, after the refresh from posting the comment, it's correct now...odd.

Posted by Disgruntled (not verified) on April 24, 2008 8:11 PM

Why is it a widescreen video in a widescreen window, but the image is squished to 4:3?

Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on April 24, 2008 6:36 PM

What if the Higgs-Boson particle isnt found? Can we dump all of this crap about string theory already and get these amazingly smart people to work on things like poverty and green house gasses? You know, real problems?

Posted by Robert I. Marsh II (not verified) on April 24, 2008 3:25 PM

A QUANTUM INVERSION INDUCTION WAVE FUNCTION, SHALL LOOP FROM IMPACT TARGET, THROUGH SUPER CONDUCTORS TO HADRON UNIT IN A CAUSALITY LOOP = RELATIVITY SHIFTS 12-30 HOURS/ 30-60 MILES !!!! THE HIGGS WILL BE A SECONDARY DISCOVERY ! GOOD LUCK !

Posted by alifaan (not verified) on April 24, 2008 10:10 AM

awesome video Scobleizer.

Posted by Robert Scoble (not verified) on April 24, 2008 10:03 AM

Fun fact: Bruce Sterling, famous science fiction author, was along on this tour, along with a few other people from the LIFT Conference which is one of my favorites in the world. You can see him at about 5 minutes into this video in the background. Also on this tour is Ben Segal, who was Tim Berners-Lee's mentor when he worked at CERN and invented the Web.