What CERN means to the whole University

This has been an extraordinary week. As a Physicist and a Vice-Chancellor, watching the news come through about the Higgs Boson discovery at CERN was wonderful. I felt so proud of my colleagues at Sheffield, many of whom played a vital part in this powerful and superbly coordinated international team.

As the headlines focused on scientific discovery, I started emailing colleagues around the world who have worked on this astonishing achievement for the best part of their professional lives. People who have grappled with challenges they could not know would be resolved in their lifetimes, but who had the breathtaking audacity to believe that our universe at its most fundamental level is not only astonishing but also explicable. And who were determined to ‘discover and understand’.

Yet the celebrations mask the decades of effort and collaboration. How can people give so much of themselves for an idea, for a question?

The answer to this question is at the heart of what academics do, and what a University is for. Academics dedicate their lives to understanding what is not understood. They also have a faith that the world is understandable. Einstein would have called them the followers of Spinoza!

While watching part of the CERN announcement I thought back to when I first heard about a Higgs Boson. It was in a book I had as a postgraduate student and I pulled that very book off the shelf again this week. The ideas are so fascinating, the core concept being that the mass of particles can come about because of their motion through a sea of Higgs Bosons – specialist language now on the tip of the tongue of the world.

But why is this so important? Why should the world and its media even care?

You don’t have to be a scientist to have found this week inspiring, but some understanding helps. In our most basic description of how two bits of matter interact, we see them sending messenger particles, called ‘bosons’, back and forth between them. If these messenger particles are mass-less, like the photons in sunlight, they travel at the speed of light across the universe.

What this week allows us to build is a theory about the forces they carry. The Higgs mechanism shows how the particles that carry forces can start mass-less, and then gain mass by the Higgs mechanism – a breathtaking moment of transformation.

This astonishing insight allows us to develop a theory about how other forces work, and from this basic understanding to make predictions of so very many features of the world. It was invented so that it is possible to predict the fundamental properties of matter. It allows us to understand our world and our universe in new ways, and to put that understanding to work.

What was announced from CERN this week will generate a new realm of possible studies, and as a scientist I have to admit that I am deeply jealous of the young minds who will get to explore the new realm that is opens up. As Wordsworth said, there are times when you realise that youth carries with it great possibility as it enters a new day, a new era – “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

But beyond the inspiring theory, we in Sheffield have something else to celebrate in relation to CERN. If we actually want to see the particles and be sure that the beautiful theory is actually right we have to have technicians, engineers, computer scientists. They are the people who built the Large Hadron Collider – its detectors and computer control systems.

Our scientific technicians work worked at CERN were directly involved in making this possible. What takes place at CERN is a grand project in its concept but also its technical prowess. The building of the detection system for example relied on, and drove significantly the development of new optical fibre materials. This distributed processing of the vast amount of data produced by the data was also a triumph of long term vision and worldwide collaboration. Who knows where this innovation will lead us next, and how this will change our lives? But it is worth remembering that the world wide web itself was invented by a particle physicist, Sir Tim Berners Lee.

So as well as the achievements of theory, this week was also a perfect time to note all those skills which make discovery possible – and it was another huge source of pride to me that it was at this University in a city so connected with skilled craftsmanship that this week we have joined with the Institute of Science and Technology to launch long overdue UK professional recognition for scientific professional staff and technicians.

So let's celebrate this achievement of, as Einstein would say, the faith that the world is understandable, and our own roles in all our subjects and the support of teaching, learning and research we are privileged to share. It is a wonderful thing to share such a mission, and the quest for more knowledge is truly on.