• Question: what is your favourite discovery?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This one is easy for me, it definitely has to be the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012. This is the particle that is linked to the mechanism which gives masses to all other particles. The mechanism that creates the Higgs boson was first identified by Prof. Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, where I work. That was over 50 years ago when he (along with some other scientists from elsewhere) first wrote down the theory of the Higgs. It has taken all of the time since then to build and operate many different experiments at CERN and at other international laboratories to build up the evidence for the Higgs.

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Until few weeks ago I would have said the BICEP2 discovery of primordial gravitational waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) ( dwarfy88, or anyone, if you want to know what this is, please ask me!!! it’s just a bit long to explain here!). But now, we don’t know yet if it will be confirmed by other experiment. It turns out that the measurement was a lot harder to do than the team was expecting. It would have been my favourite because that would have been a very strong evidence for inflation, which is what I work on!! It’s also the first completely unexpected high energy theoretical discovery of my scientific life-time. The Higgs was cool too, but it was expected for a long time that it was there… 😉

      If not BICEP2, then I’d say the discovery that time flows at different speeds on high-altitude planes or on satellites as compared to on the surface of the Earth. It is a prediction of General Relativity, and I find that absolutely mind-blowing!!

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      The discovery that there are planets around other stars. That, even though our Solar system is incredibly special to us, it isn’t very special at all, there are thousands just like it in our Galaxy alone. This is amazing to think that if our Sun isn’t that special, and our Earth isn’t that special, perhaps we aren’t that special and somewhere out there, on another Earth around another Sun, there is life thinking about the same things we are! Without discovering those other planets (exo-planets we call them), we might still think we were pretty damn special!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I think my favourite was the discovery of space, helped by the invention of the telescope!

      People always knew space existed, but actually being able to see things beyond what we could see with our naked eyes lead the western world to reevaluate what we thought was true and what wasn’t.

      The reason I say western world is because a lot of science was discovered by the Babylonians, Greeks and Arabics many years before we thought about it over here, but it all got lost through time and the Roman Invasions 🙁

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