The Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN [Council de European Research Nuclearie] had captured the imagination of the young and he old alike, as the media had gone into a frenzy declaring that the world would come to an end as a result of this massive experiment, costing billions of dollars and worked upon by thousands of scientists, from all over the world.

On Monday, 12th January 2009 the students of DBL were treated to a few truths about LHC from an insider’s perspective, by Mr. Souvik Das, a 26 year old scientist (DB Park Circus alumnus) working on the LHC project. 700 students sat through almost 2 hours, in rapt attention, as Mr. Das unravelled to us how the LHC aimed at finding most of the answers that baffled the scientists, by colliding two beams of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light and at conditions mimicking those of the outer space. These experiments would probably enable the scientists to detect the elusive Higgs-Boson that has been predicted theoretically and answer such questions as why there is not so much antimatter as there is matter in the universe.

The “Q and A” round that followed brought up questions like - “If the Higgs-Boson is not found, then what next?” Mr. Das explained that, that would mean an end to the present theories but would open up extremely exciting possibilities before scientists, of starting from scratch. Another vital question that came up was why  human beings or for that matter any organism has life, while inanimate objects like stones lack life, even though they both are made up of the same protons and other subatomic particles. Mr. Das clarified, that life is what it is today, because how the protons and other subatomic particles came to be arranged, when life was formed millions of years ago.

When finally, Mr. Das took leave of us, the auditorium rose upto give him a standing ovation. 700 students quietly devouring high- end physics for 2 hours, such was the captivity of Mr. Das’s lecture.

… Avradeep Dutta – XI C