SITC follows up visit to CERN with evidence from senior physicists
In January the Committee visited CERN the world-leading European laboratory for particle physics and home to the Large Hadron Collider – an incredible underground facility that aims to develop human understanding of energy, matter and how the universe works.
Meeting details
On Wednesday 6 March, starting at 0930, the Committee will hear from an eminent lineup of scientists, including the Government’s former chief scientific advisor Professor Sir David King, on current and future work at CERN, and the role the UK might play in it.
Research conducted at CERN has created novel technologies which have benefited society in fields as diverse as aerospace, the environment, healthcare and digital. The most widely known CERN technology is the World Wide Web which was developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst he worked at CERN in 1989. Particle physics and aerospace share similar operational conditions, requiring infrastructure that can cope with extreme environments including extreme radiation, temperature, and pressure, and offer increased understanding of human adaptation to our changing world.
In 2013, it was announced that Peter Higgs and François Englert would share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles", confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
The UK has played a critical role in all these major scientific experiments and discoveries. Many UK scientists have held senior leadership positions within CERN, including two previous Director Generals. But the latest CERN strategy acknowledges that the UK is getting less value for money than other member states when comparing financial contributions, and in recent years a major debate has opened up about the real value of planned, extremely costly new installations and facilities like the Future Circular Collider.
How will this huge, expensive project benefit science and the wider public, and what will be the UK’s involvement and benefit in all of CERN’s work, present and future?