What is the Universe Made Of? With Dr. Robert Orr (29/2/08)
Voices of Reason series:
WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE MADE OF? THE HIGGS, DARK MATTER, AND THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER (Future of Science Series),
Professor Robert Orr, Dept of Physics, University of Toronto
The Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator is the biggest, most
ambitious and most international science experiment of all time,
costing over 2B dollars, with data to be sent to 7,000 scientists in 80
countries...
And it's set to go online in May 2008!
The LHC could help scientists in discovering the Grand Unified Theory and answer questions like
• Does the universe have extra dimensions?
• How do particles get mass?
• What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy, accounting for over 90% of the universe?
• Where does string theory fit in?
A PUBLIC EVENT. NO SCIENCE BACKGROUND REQUIRED
Robert Orr is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the
University of Toronto. He was NSERC Principal Investigator for ATLAS
Canada from 1994 to 2007. ATLAS is a detector within the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN and one of Canada's principle contributions to the
project. Professor Orr is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and
the winner of a 2006 ORION (Ontario Research and Innovation Optical
Network) Discovery Award of Merit. Come Experience the Future of
Physics!
Talk Description:
There is good reason to believe that the field of elementary particle
physics will undergo a renaissance in the next few years. The standard
model was well established by the early 1980s, and the experimental
programs at LEP and the Tevatron particle accelerators, in the
following 25 years, have confirmed how accurate a picture the standard
model provides of physics at the smallest distance scales accessible.
However, we have known for some time that this can only be a partial
description of the micro-scale.
The observation of cosmological dark matter also hints that there exist particles, and perhaps forces and dimensions, beyond those encompassed by the standard model. The turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider and ATLAS at CERN in 2008 could well lead to a flood of new, exciting, and unexpected phenomena. I will touch on these ideas, but will concentrate on how the technological challenges of accessing this new energy domain have been met.
Robert S. Orr Bio
Professor Orr was born in Iran, and grew up in Scotland and South
Wales. His father and uncles were all engineers in the ship building
industry. His interest in physics was sparked early in his childhood by
trying to make sense of his father's textbooks. "Ever since I was a
child, I took things apart to see how they worked" says Orr. "Doing
that with matter is the ultimate challenge."
At present he is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. He was NSERC Principal Investigator for ATLAS Canada from 1994 to 2007. ATLAS is a detector within the LHC at CERN. Orr earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. at Imperial College, University of London, UK, and was a Post Doctoral Researcher at Rutherford Laboratory, also in the UK, as well as at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. From 1974 to 1981 he was a CERN Fellow and Staff Physicist. He came to Canada in 1981 as an Institute of Particle Physics Research Scientist, and became a member of the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1989. Orr has worked at many of the world's particle physics labs in the USA, Germany and Japan. He has a particular interest in the application of large scale computing clusters in this field, and in the development of new finds of detection devices.
Part 1:
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utXsZR1jM6s&feature=user
For pictures of the event, click on the photo below:
