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I was delighted to find this talk by Brian Cox when I was trawling through TED trying to pick a video to reflect on for this coming module of my Masters course at The Institute. I had recently seen a Horizon documentary by Cox exploring the subject of Nuclear Fusion titled ‘Can we make a star on Earth?’. His passionate, often humorous presentation of what by any standard is an extremely complicated science was enthralling and challenging.
In this Ted talk Cox takes us on an inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider and from there to the beginning of time and space.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the latest and most powerful in a series of particle accelerators which runs for 27km (16.5m) in a circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the Swiss/French border at Geneva. Over the last 70 years, it has allowed scientists to penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart of matter and further and further back in time.
The LHC fires protons round the 27kn tunnel eleven thousand times a second, at a speed of 99.99999999% the speed of sound, colliding them into each other. They do this in order to recreate the conditions, which existed a billionth of a second after the universe began, in essence creating in a lab a mini big bang.
Why do they do this? As Cox explains the purpose of the whole project is to understand what everything is made of and how it all sticks together. Everything. All hundred billion galaxies of everything.
Cox then takes us through his Creation Story and even shows us a diagram of the universe which he refers to as The Face of God.
I am constantly amazed by this science which I can barely understand. This science which tells me that the carbon atoms in my finger nail have had to travel billions of miles through space and time, at some point hurtling through the galaxy at nearly the speed of light, and were birthed within a distant star.
I am constantly amazed that I am here at all and I am increasingly grateful that I am.
