THE European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Hadron Collider does just that: making subatomic particles collide to see what they break up into and discover what held them together in the first place, as well as what other forces are yet unaccounted for in the universe.
The answers can start another round of questions. The answers can also show that they were the wrong questions to ask, and that the collider cannot give all the answers.
All this may sound too abstract, but commercial applications are, in fact, found along the way. Out of pure science comes pure profit, like Alan Turing’s machine that made Apple Inc. richer than the Russian economy.
But the big news recently is that CERN has just elected its first female director. Fabiola Gianotti, 52, comes to the job with a mastery of Latin and classical ballet. She switched to advanced physics when art didn’t pay. As a result of her background, she is physically poised, unlike geeks; articulate; and thinks that nothing about CERN’s findings is beyond common understanding and defies simplification. After all, she switched just like that, from Latin and ballet to advanced physics.
Fabiola has authorized the use of a comic-book script to publish CERN’s discoveries. It was she who announced what mathematics hitherto had only proved: that the Hadron Collider had found the Higgs boson. The name stuck in the public mind, not least because of its similarity to bosom. I’m sure she won’t find that sexist, so long as it gets the message across.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano