Science and Technology Facilities Council
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Step inside the Science Museum and find yourself at the world’s largest science experiment
The exhibition sponsored by STFC and developed in close collaboration with CERN has been designed with a creative team including an Olivier award-winning playwright and CGI film-maker. It uses a blend of theatre, video and sound alongside artefacts from the LHC to make it feel as real as being at CERN itself.
The huge exhibit takes you behind the scenes at CERN to witness the announcement of the Higgs Boson discovery. Find yourself in the CERN lecture theatre as history is being made and then walk the tunnels where the discovery really happened. Collider features authentic objects from CERN, from huge superconducting magnets to incredibly precise detectors used to record the passage of tiny, invisible particles. You will even find the empty champagne bottle that Peter Higgs shared with friends the night before CERN announced to the world that they had found the particle he first theorised almost 60 years ago.
The discovery of the Higgs boson, the search for dark matter and the mystery of where all the antimatter has gone are all key research areas at CERN that push the boundaries of our understanding of the Universe. The exhibition also shows how the science would not be possible without the extensive team of engineers and technicians that outnumber the research scientists by ten to one.
LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It took international teams numbering in the thousands to design, construct and operate the 27km collider and its four giant particle detectors. The exhibition gives you the chance to explore the collider’s cathedral-sized detector caverns, meeting the engineers who build the impossible along the way. You even have the opportunity to stand at the heart of a collision. At CERN 100m below the ground the LHC’s particles travel at 99.999999% of the speed of light!
End your visit in a replica CERN office where you can get a feel for what it might be like to work there. You never know, you might be in the real one someday!
STFC, which sponsors the exhibition, manages the UK subscription to CERN. UK membership of CERN gives our physicists and engineers access to the experiments and allows UK industry to bid for contracts, UK nationals to compete for jobs and research positions at CERN, and UK schools and teachers to visit.
In return, UK companies have won £47 Million in contracts from CERN over the last three years – a benefit to the UK economy that is only possible due to STFC’s membership of CERN. With nearly 600 UK scientists regularly working at CERN the UK has made major strategic investments in the LHC and the development of the experimental detectors and played a central role in much of the research that has taken place at the LHC in the last three years.
Collider remains open until April 2014. Please check the Science Museum website for more information.
