• Question: What is you favorite experiment

    Asked by to Laurence, Greig, Dave on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hi disp! I work on an experiment called LHCb at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, so for me, that has to be my favourite experiment 🙂 The size of the experiment is big: the main detector is 5m tall and wide and 20m long. We are using it to study the what comes out of the collisions between protons that are accelerated to high energy by the LHC.

      http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      This is really difficult to chose just one!
      I’d say the experiment that confirmed that time flows at different speeds on high-altitude planes or on satellites as compared to on the surface of the Earth. It is a prediction of General Relativity, and I find that absolutely mind-blowing!!

      But than I also find COBE really really amazing!! COBE was a satellite experiment launched at the end of 1989 that measured the afterglow of the Big Bang in the sky (a homogeneous radiation called the Cosmic Microwave Background – CMB for short). It measured it so precisely that it found the tiny inhomogeneities that are the seeds from which all the structure, the stars, the galaxies, the clusters, (everything!!!) of the Universe developed. And the most amazing thing is, it’s in perfect agreement with the predictions of inflation, which is what I work on :D. It was so important that it won the Nobel prize in 2006!

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Not sure if it can be called an experiment but my favourite apparatus is definitely the Very Large Telescope where I work. It’s a set of 4 giant telescopes (each made from a mirror that is 8m across!) high in the Atacama Desert in Chile. You can read more about it here: http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt/

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