UC RUSAL President's Forum

Answering Gauguin's Questions with the Large Hadron Collider: What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

Prof. John ELLIS, King's College London & European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

Cosmology High Energy Physics Particle Physics Physics

Synopsis

One of the most ambitious and largest scientific experiments ever, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva tries to address the most fundamental questions of physics and the cosmos, like those posed in Paul Gauguin's famous painting "What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" This talk will review the prospects for finding the answers. In particular, the new particle discovered recently at the LHC may be the Higgs boson that provides the masses of elementary particles, making possible the existence of atoms and explaining why we do not glow in the dark.