As excitement built around this week’s announcement of the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider, I wondered whether we ought to be using this blog to mark the occasion in some way. With scientists asking people not to speculate too much about what the result might be, I was pretty sure we ought to wait for results. And once they were out, it was obvious enough would be written elsewhere.
The BBC carried a series of reactions from eminent scientists (including a video from Professor Stephen Hawking) about what the findings mean. Debates on who should win the Nobel Prize, or have roads named after them, will go on for some time. But whichever way you look at it, the announcement at CERN is a triumph of international collaboration. CERN have helpfully listed every country involved, and it makes impressive reading. Even the name Higgs-Boson demonstrates the international dimension to science. Professors Peter Higgs and Satyendra Nath Bose, from the UK and India, each had break-though insights combined and now borne out by an international experiment.
However, as with all eponymous discoveries, the name only tells part of the story. As the Deccan Herald pointed out, the Indian connection doesn’t end with Bose and the Bose-Einstein condensate (takes me back to half remembered Quantum Mechanics 1 in my first year…). India has helped fund the LHC and many Indian scientists have been involved with interpreting the results.
The contributions the UK and India each made to the LHC and CERN are helpfully summarised on CERN’s website. You can also see which of the many institutions in each country are collaborating on the results. I often think however, that when you break down science into money spent, and the august names of the institutions involved, you lose sight of that fact that scientific discovery is a deeply human endeavour. With that in mind, I’ll finish by pointing to you towards some of CERN’s people and the videos they’ve been posting about how their work. Who better to hear from this week?