For physics 2009 was a particularly important year due to the coming
on-line, for the second time, of the
$10 billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. How many of you have
heard of the Large Hadron Collider? It is one of the most important
instruments ever built. By reproducing the kind of collisions that
happened soon after the
Big Bang, it is designed to discover the origin of
mass. One of the detectors, called ATLAS, is partly built by
Australian scientists from the University of Melbourne. The first
collisions were reported only very recently.
Keep an eye out for major announcements during this year.
Big Bang Theory has even come to our
television sets. How many of you have seen this wonderful comedy series? I
can tell you that the physics commentary is very accurate, but the
caricatures of the physics students are certainly not. Well, perhaps there is
some truth there somewhere...
We already know in this Century that we know less than what we thought
we knew in the last Century. We don't understand the origins of mass,
or what is Dark Matter or why we have Dark Energy. So we need bright young
scientists to help us out, and that is why I am here.
I figure my first victim, I mean candidate, might be your best year-11
physics student of last year.
It gives me great pleasure to award this prize, which is Simon Singh's
book "Big Bang, The origin of the Universe", to ...
mailto: Igor Bray
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