CERN's Big Bang Machine: The Large Hadron Collider, Professor Brian Cox

    8.00p.m. Lecture Theatre A, Purdie Building, Department of Chemistry

Brian Cox is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. He is also working on the FP420 R&D project in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 meters from the interaction points of the main experiments.
   
   
Cox has received many awards for his efforts to publicise science. In 2002 he was elected an International Fellow of the Explorers Club and in 2006 Cox received the British Association Lord Kelvin Award for this work. A frequent lecturer, he was keynote speaker at the Australian Science Festival in 2006.

Cox is also known for his involvement in science programmes for BBC radio and television, including In Einstein's Shadow,  the BBC Horizon series  ("Large Hadron Collider and the Big Bang", "What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity" and "Do You Know What Time It Is?") and for voiceovers on the BBC's Bitesize revision programmes. Cox was the science adviser for the sci-fi movie Sunshine and was featured on the Discovery Channel special Megaworld: Switzerland. He also gives regular lectures on the LHC.

For more information, please see http://www.apolloschildren.com/brian/index.html

This will be preceded by an exhibition of hands-on displays and experiments provided by the Particle Physics for Scottish Schools project (PP4SS) which is supported by the School of Physics and Astronomy, the University of Edinburgh and by STFC. The exhibition will be staffed by experienced demonstrators familiar with the PP4SS  setups, mostly research students themselves. You are encouraged to try out the displays and experiments and to be drawn into discussions about the topics on display and often also further afield. To find more background about the PP4SS project please look at:

http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/main.html and http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/pages/pp4ss/pp4ss-exhibits.html&