TED Talk Tuesday: Higgs Particle and Explorers

Today marked an exciting advance in our scientific understanding of the universe and the forces behind it. And, it just so happened to collide with our energy unit.

This morning, I showed students clips from Brian Cox's TED talk explaining CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"27 Kilometers in circumference, it's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries have come together over several decades to build this machine."

The talk is from 2008 and as Cox notes, the Atlas portion of the collider was completed the morning he gave the talk below. In the video, Brian does an exceptional job explaining what the Higgs Particle is and why it's so important to understanding our universe. I won't even try to explain it, as I'm having a pretty tough time wrapping my own head around the concept. But I will highly recommend his video and this article for more information about the Higgs Boson.

After we watched Brian's talk and noted it took place three years ago, I switched windows and pulled up the live webcast from CERN.

Clip from this morning's webcast. 

Now, I couldn't explain a lick of what these physicist were talking about. However, I read them an excerpt of the story referring to this advancement as, "Such a discovery would rank in importance with major breakthroughs of the last century, going back to Einstein’s first formulation of quantum physics..."  I wanted the students to see that they had the same access as scientists to one of the most exciting announcements of our time.

I read yesterday that the speculation around this morning's conference was to confirm the observation of the Higgs Particle. After reading more about today's discussion, it appears that the conference was to confirm that the experiments continue to hint at the Higgs but that it has not yet pinned it down. This is not bad news. Rather, it seems to have opened the door to even more theories. Either way, it's an exciting time in our scientific understanding of the universe. And we were there.

Inside the Atlas Portion of the Large Hadron Collider 

"So what do we do with this information?" We discussed that just like the Higgs Particle, the theory of the atom existed long before scientists were able to prove it's existence. But when they did, it brought us to an entirely new understanding of our world and paved the way for nuclear energy and the atomic bomb. Who knows what advancements will come out of this discovery. But as I told the students, "It will be you guys that figure that out."

Science breakthroughs don't usually line up as planned. We often hear stories about the various unexpected discoveries. Failure in Science can be every bit as important as discoveries. Just like so many other aspects of our lives, we often learn more more from one failure than we do from ten successes. It's about what we do with the failures. This applies to the LHC. Below is a 3 minute update that Brian Cox gave a year after his 2008 talk about what went wrong with the collider before this enormous breakthrough.



I couldn't be happier to share this final connection with you. In the talk below, Brian Cox makes an incredible case for how importnat it is to fund scientific research. As Brian explains, the scientists studying everything from the Higgs Particle to deep space are our current day explorers.

So, as students commence their study of the explorers of old, it's essential for them to understand that just because the majority of our planet has been mapped doesn't mean we're done. As Brian discusses below,

"When Alexander Flemming woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't mean to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic. The explorers of the world of the atom didn't intend to invent the transistor and they certainly didn't intend to describe the mechanics of a supernova explosions which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe."