Henry Rae, one of the winners of our STEM Inspiration Awards, got the chance to go to CERN as part of his prize - he tells us all about his experience.
I was truly overwhelmed by the scale of everything at CERN - the machines, budgets, number of staff and the variety of roles were all equally impressive. I particularly liked seeing how people collaborate internationally. It is inspirational to see how so many countries can work together so successfully.
Coming from a medical background, I only knew a little bit of physics before my trip to CERN. Thankfully this wasn’t a problem as all our guides were very good communicators and knew their subjects well. I learned more about particle physics in those two days than I have learned in my entire life.
The Large Hadron Collider is a staggering 27km in diameter. The particle detector we visited was equally enormous, weighing 7,000 tonnes. The Large Hadron Collider fires some of the smallest particles in the universe in different directions at nearly the speed of light so accurately that they smash into each other at very specific places so the detectors can see what happens.
What I knew about antimatter had been gathered by watching sci-fi programmes on TV that were inevitably inaccurate. I found this out when we visited the Antimatter Factory. Yes, there really is an Antimatter Factory, which really does make antimatter.
The other STEM Inspiration Award winners that I spoke to on my visit were knowledgeable in their fields, providing me with the enthusiasm to continue to further my public engagement and outreach activities for the School of Medicine at the University of St Andrews. I hope to keep in contact with them and collaborate further with them in the future.
It wasn’t just the other winners I was impressed with – it was CERN’s employees too. On the first day, we had dinner with some of them. Over a traditional Swiss meal and a raclette, I chatted to a few members of staff – all of whom were incredibly positive about CERN and their experiences of working there.
CERN has discovered and developed many things, some we know very well like the World Wide Web, touchscreens for phones and iPads and medical pet scans and MRI scans. Who knows what else will come out of CERN in the future?