"On 1 January, Thomson takes over as the director general of Cern, the multi-Nobel prizewinning nuclear physics laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva. It is here, deep beneath the ground, that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest scientific instrument ever built, recreates conditions that existed microseconds after the big bang. The machine won its place in history for discovering the mysterious Higgs boson, whose accompanying field turns space into a kind of cosmic glue."
"In an office on the first floor of the Cavendish laboratory, past a model of the DNA double helix discovered in Cambridge by James Watson and Francis Crick more than 70 years ago, Thomson is far from disconsolate about the shutdown. If anything, he is relishing what the next five years hold. The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data, he says. There's going to be plenty to analyse over the period. The physics results will keep on coming."
Mark Thomson will become director-general of CERN on 1 January and will pause Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operations early in his five-year term to allow engineering work. The LHC recreates conditions microseconds after the big bang and discovered the Higgs boson, whose field gives space a glue-like quality. Thomson welcomes the shutdown because the collider is producing vast datasets that will provide years of analysis and physics results. Thomson studied physics at Oxford after attending a comprehensive school in Worthing; he became the first in his family to attend university and traced his interest to a popular CERN book read in his teens.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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