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| LHCb Vertex Locators from University of Liverpool used in Large Hadron Collider. Courtesy Science Museum |
London, UK — The Science Museum is working with CERN in Geneva to create a temporary exhibition that will allow visitors to experience what if feels like to operate the biggest scientific experiement on the planet, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The exhibit is scheduled for Autumn 2013 and will run for six months.
“The Science Museum is among the world’s leading centres for public engagement with science,” said Prof Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN, “and I’m very pleased for CERN to be working with the museum on this important new touring exhibition about the LHC. CERN is enjoying unprecedented public attention, and initiatives like this help turn that into the sustained public engagement with science that is so vital in our science dominated age.”
In the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle collider, scientists and engineers work at the extremes of temperature, vacuum and energy to recreate conditions not seen since just after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.
The museum will be collaborating with theatre and digital producers to create an immersive experience so visitors can participate in the greatest intellectual adventure on the planet.
The exhibition, which is being devised to tour museums worldwide, will provide visitors with access to members of the vast team of 10,000 scientists and engineers who work with CERN to reveal what motivates them, said Heuer.
The exhibition will give visitors a close-up look at remarkable examples of CERN engineering, from the bottle of hydrogen gas that feeds the great machine to the vast dipole magnets. There will be many historic objects from the museum’s world leading collections, including JJ Thomson’s apparatus which led to the discovery of the electron, and the accelerator Cockcroft and Walton used to first split the atom.
