Blow Your Mind

Physics has always asked the big questions like ‘what is everything made of?’ and ‘how did it all get here?’ The search for the answers has uncovered fascinating phenomena and thrown up some of the most bizarre theories in nature. And while it has also left us with plenty of unexpected questions, it might have put us on the brink of getting to the bottom of the most fundamental questions there are.

Dr Brian Cox from the University of Manchester, a commentator on This Morning and BBC Radio 4, will talk about missing bits of understanding in the universe, in particular the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. The LHC is a particle accelerator which will recreate conditions similar to those that occurred during the big bang. Due to switch on in December 2007, it will collide beams of protons at 99.999% the speed of light to try and answer one of the universe’s great unsolved mysteries: what is the origin of mass?

Dr Brian Cox said: 'Discovering the origin of mass is the next step in our quest to understand the basic building blocks of the Universe. Historically, blue skies research into seemingly esoteric but fundamental questions such as this have led to wonderful developments in science and technology which have touched all our lives. This event at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum will be a unique opportunity for the public to find out what they want to know about the frontiers of fundamental physics today.'

Brian Clegg, author of the bestselling book Infinity will talk about the strangest concept in all of physics: quantum entanglement. It was dreamed up by Einstein in 1935 to try to disprove quantum theory, but for once he was proved wrong when entanglement was eventually demonstrated in the lab. The concept is simple but bizarre. Two quantum particles – photons or atoms, for instance – can be put in a special entangled state that means even if they are separated to opposite ends of the universe, a change in one is instantly reflected in the other.

Since the 1990s applications of entanglement have been bursting out from the laboratory. They include unbreakable encryption, quantum teleportation – a small-scale but real equivalent of a Star Trek transporter – and quantum computers that use particles like photons as their bits rather than computer chips. Quantum computers are so fast they will be able to solve problems that conventional computers never could, even if they had the lifetime of the universe to work through them.

Tim Sumner from Imperial College is on the search for a mysterious substance called ‘dark matter’. As yet we can’t see it, but the behaviour of what we can see suggests it, and the related ‘dark energy’, must make up the majority of the universe. What is it? Where is it? The hunt is on to find out.

You’ll also be able to talk to an expert about what happened at the very beginning of time.

Event organised by:
The Science Museum

Speakers

Maggie Aderin, Science Innovation Ltd
Brian Clegg, author
Brian Cox, broadcaster and Research Fellow, High Energy Physics group, University of Manchester
Tim Sumner, Experimental Astrophysics, Imperial College London