• Question: How will the research of the scientist at CERN with the Large Hadron Colider expand our understanding of the universe?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 15 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 15 Jun 2014:

      One of the main aims of CERN is to understand particles – the builing blocks of everything you see around you and everything you dont.

      Some of the main questions coming out of CERN are, “where is all the antimatter”, “do antiparticles have different physics to particles”, “what is this thing made of!”, “can we make black holes”, “do wormholes exists”… the list goes on.

      CERN aims to find answers to these questions, and doing so will not only improve our understanding of what goes on around us, but enable us to solve existing problems using different methods, and so hopefully make better cures for things like cancers, better energy sources, and ANTI-GRAVITY SUITS! coz lets face it, that would be cool 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Aimee said it beautifully (well, maybe I still need to be convinced about the antigrav suit…)
      On top of what Aimee said, I’d like to mention one extra very important question the LHC is trying to answer. That question is: What is dark matter??

      Dark matter is a kind of matter we think makes up 85% of the matter in the Universe, except that, because it’s dark (more precisely, it doesn’t interact with light: it neither emits nor absorbs it), we cannot see it at all. What this means is that all the stuff we know and are made of, the air, my arms and legs, the oceans, rocks, cars, houses, planets, stars, frogs, monkeys – basically everything we can see around us – only makes up about 15% of all the matter that exists in the Universe.

      So how do we know it’s there? Because it has a mass, and so it influences all the normal matter through gravity. It’s a bit like looking outside on a sunny day and seeing a big shadow on the ground. Even without looking up or knowing what it is, I know there has to be something to make that shadow (a cloud, or something).

      So at CERN a lot of scientists were hoping that LHC will be able to create the particles of dark matter. That would be a major discovery (I mean, it is 85% of the matter of the Universe!), and resolve one of the biggest puzzles of modern astrophysics.

      So far, scientists haven’t found any dark matter particles, but lots are still very hopeful. Even if we eventually don’t find dark matter at the LHC, we will still have learnt a lot since that will allow to disprove MANY theories of dark matter.

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