Nobel Prize Winners and Teacher Working Groups

Yesterday afternoon's lecture from the winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Steven Weinberg, was amazing. The Globe of Science and Innovation (the venue for the talk) was so full that people were being turned back and weren't allowed in. Admittedly I was not very familiar with the subject content of the lecture, but to be in the presence of such an interesting Physics speaker was amazing. He weaved a story through his lecture and it was really a moment I won't forget. CERN is just an unbelievable place.

This week has seen the start of our working groups on teacher projects. I have decided to interview female physicists that work at CERN and come up with some classroom activities to promote the amazing opportunities available to female scientists. I will be bringing to you some of the profiles next week, and hopefully some video also.

I am really looking forward to the second part of Rolf Landua's lecture on antimatter, and the experiments that are taking place in the "Antimatter Factory", which is also known as the antiproton decelerator (AD). Every particle that we know, electron, proton etc has an antimatter equivalent. Electrons have positrons as there antimatter. As far as physicists can tell the matter and antimatter pairs are identical, apart from some minor intrinsic values, such as their charge. At the antimatter factory they have created antiprotons (negatively charged protons) and antihydrogen atoms also. If you have read or seen Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, then you may be under the wrong impression. Although antimatter has been created at CERN, there is no way that 1 g of it could be produced. The AD on average will only produce 1 pair of proton/antiproton out of 250 000 collisions!