A universe of particles

Inside the science globe (credit: CERN)

By Michael Banks

If you live near or are travelling to the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva then you may be tempted to pay a visit to the “Universe of Particles” exhibition, which begins at the lab on 1 July.

The exhibition will be housed at CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation and will be free to enter.

The exhibition includes four main themes including “mysterious worlds” looking at the universe and its evolution and “the Large Hadron Collider” (LHC), which is all about the world’s largest accelerator at CERN, while “detecting particles” looks at the experiments at the LHC and “science without borders” is about international scientific collaborations and the spin-offs of particle-physics research.

The four zones each contain interactive games as well as audio and video “kiosks” inside “luminous spheres” that explain research done at CERN.

At certain times during the day the whole globe will become part of the exhibition and its walls will turn into a screen on which a six minute video runs recounting the history of the Big Bang.

The exhibition will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Monday to Saturday, and being free there is really no excuse not to go.