The Photography At CERN Is Helping Solve The Mysteries Of The Universe

Everyone’s favourite mega-machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is meant to help humans some of the most basic questions about the nature of our world. How it goes about this is — in a word — complex. But part of it involves a bit of good old-fashioned (kind of) photography.

This documentary put out by the Carnegie Museum of Art takes you inside a couple of different projects at the LHC, both of which use photography in their study of particle physics. One such project is AEgIS, which uses analogue photographic emulsion to capture the trajectories of anti-protons as they are smashed into a surface. The other project is the ATLAS Pixel Detector, which is actually an enormous digital camera.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

The Photography At CERN Is Helping Solve The Mysteries Of The Universe

Everyone’s favourite mega-machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is meant to help humans some of the most basic questions about the nature of our world. How it goes about this is — in a word — complex. But part of it involves a bit of good old-fashioned (kind of) photography.

This documentary put out by the Carnegie Museum of Art takes you inside a couple of different projects at the LHC, both of which use photography in their study of particle physics. One such project is AEgIS, which uses analogue photographic emulsion to capture the trajectories of anti-protons as they are smashed into a surface. The other project is the ATLAS Pixel Detector, which is actually an enormous digital camera.

more…

If we examine all of the discoveries that CERN has made since day one, how many of these have made an improvement in the day to day lives of any of the worlds citizens? and what are some of these discoveries?

> If we examine all of the discoveries that CERN has made since day one, how many of these have made an improvement in the day to day lives of any of the worlds citizens? and what are some of these discoveries?

TIC. You can’t argue that it hasn’t been essential in developing the muon detectors that were used to take radiographs of the internal structure of ancient stepped pyramids in Mexico. Muons are actually very useful.

If we get more extreme, our understanding of the nearby Crab Nebula relies on the very most modern results from CERN. Also dependent on the most modern results from CERN is our knowledge that the universe is only metastable, not stable – it could collapse/explode at any moment, and that would affect the daily lives of anyone who happens to be alive at the time.

Going further back, discoveries at CERN have made sense of cosmic rays, which affect the day to day lives most noticeably of people who frequently fly on aircraft.

Let’s see, what else? CERN in the early days did a lot of work on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, so was involved in the developments that led to that medical diagnostic tool.

Other early work at CERN included other extremely practical work. This included work on X-rays (including X-ray diffraction), molecular spectra and molecular structure, electronic processes in ionic crystals, the kinetic theory of liquids, the statistical theory of communication, the application of the lognormal distribution to economics, the theory of dielectrics, dislocation and plastic flow in crystals (essential for understanding how steel works), diffusion in solids, liquids and gases (used in chromatography), a study of phase transition (melting and freezing), much useful work in applied mathematics, piezoelectricity, the theory of electrons and holes in semiconductors (computer chips), etc.