What is the universe made of?

DW (English)

To unveil more secrets of the universe, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been trying to get to the bottom of the Big Bang since 1954. For 70 years, CERN has changed how we see the universe at the tiniest scales.

Transcript

00:00Back in 1954, when the foundations of CERN were laid outside Geneva on the French-Swiss

00:06border, the field of high-energy physics was much more fractured than today.

00:12In the decades since, discoveries made there helped merge ideas about fundamental forces

00:17and particles into a coherent whole, what's known as the Standard Model.

00:23And CERN also laid the groundwork for many other discoveries and developments.

00:28The best-known example is the invention of the World Wide Web.

00:32Many developments for medical physics and life sciences, PET scanners, accelerators

00:41for hospitals, and many more.

00:44The particle accelerators that enable experiments in high-energy physics are at the heart of

00:50CERN.

00:51Many have been built there over the years.

00:53Among them is the largest in the world, a 27-kilometer-long ring called the Large Hadron

00:59Collider, or LHC.

01:01Inside it, particles are accelerated to very high speeds in opposite directions, then smashed

01:07together, revealing even more fundamental components, like the Higgs boson, which eluded

01:13detection for decades.

01:16Proof it existed won its namesake physicist Peter Higgs and his colleague François Englert

01:22the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

01:27The quest that uses the biggest of machines to study the tiniest of particles is far from

01:31over.

01:32There are still many open questions in the Standard Model, and an even larger particle

01:37accelerator at CERN might help answer them.

01:40Called the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, it would be over 90 kilometers in circumference

01:47and cost billions.

01:49It could go where the LHC and other colliders can't, but do we really need it?

01:55There is no other way to really chart this uncharted territory than building a new collider.

02:04The FCC will give us a chance, at least, to answer the most important open questions that

02:12we have in particle physics.

02:15A feasibility study is ongoing, and it's far from clear that the FCC will ever be built.

02:21But even if it isn't, groundbreaking research in particle physics will continue to take

02:26place in Geneva for the foreseeable future.

02:29Happy birthday, CERN!

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