ISSYP 2012

The world's most ambitious scientific experiment is buried 100 meters underground, straddling Switzerland and France. A billion times every minute, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) slams together protons, while four giant detectors watch closely. So how does the Large Hadron Collider work? Why can…

Just as there is a difference between knowing how to * drive* a car and understanding its functioning well enough to fix it when it breaks down, so too is there a difference between knowing how to * use* quantum theory to make predictions and understanding what it says about the world well enough to…

For the first time in human thought it is now possible to observationally determine how much matter is in the Universe as a whole. These observations strongly support the “Concordance Model” of Hot Big Bang Cosmology, and reinforce earlier indications that ordinary matter (atoms, nuclei and…