Mar 24 2015
For nearly 50 years, the Higgs boson was a tantalizing missing piece of the particle physics puzzle, theorized to exist but undiscovered by experiment.
Finding it required the largest machine ever constructed – CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – and thousands of scientists from around the world working together to sift through the subatomic shrapnel of the LHC’s particle collisions. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs was one of the most anticipated and exciting events in scientific history.
Jon Butterworth was in the midst of the excitement. A professor at University College London (UCL) and a leading researcher at LHC’s ATLAS detector, he spent the better part of a decade in search of the Higgs. In his April 1 talk at Perimeter Institute, he will give a personal account of the struggles and triumphs of the quest to find “the most wanted particle.”
“There’s nothing like explaining the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs discovery to a new set of people to make you realize how lucky you are to be a part of something that good,” says Butterworth.
The talk, part of the Perimeter Institute Public Lecture Series presented by Sun Life Financial, will be webcast live, and online viewers will be invited to submit questions for Butterworth via social media.
Apart from his research at research at UCL and CERN, Butterworth is an avid science communicator – he writes a blog for The Guardian, and recently published a book, Most Wanted Particle, published in Canada this past January.
“What’s the point of adding new knowledge if you’re the only one who knows it?” Butterworth says. “You’ve got to share the excitement. While it’s true that not everyone can be, or wants to be, a particle physicist, there’s a wonder in this exploration that ought to be shared.”
Source: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/