No new particle here, folks
One of the big pieces of news from the world of science this summer came from CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland. We've talked about the LHC many times on this program but to refresh your memories: the Collider is one of the world's largest and most complex machines, meant to help physicists answer some of the unsolved mysteries of the universe. It started operation in 2008. And in 2012, researchers found what they'd been looking for. A particle that physicists had first theorized existed in the 1960s called The Higgs Boson.
Last year, the LHC started operating at even higher energies. Giving it the power to detect other, elusive particles. And that's exactly what researchers thought they'd found… But the news of the summer was, in fact, not what researchers had been hoping for. Dr. Wendy Taylor, professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at York University, in Toronto, and a researcher at CERN, is here to talk about the news that wasn't.
Related Links:
Scientific American blog post on 'the bump that wasn't' (by theoretical physcist Lawrence M. Krauss)