#ESOF2012 – CERN to bring Accelerating Science expo to Galway

16 Jul 2012

Back: James Lyons, Boston Scientific; CERN DG Rolf-Dieter Heuer; EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn; Tom Hyland, Galway Science and Technology Forum. Front: Shauna Spillane; Firinne Kelly; Dáire Smith; Sarah Casserly; Emily Kavanagh; Ellen Casserly

Galway students will be in for a cosmic treat this September as the particle physics laboratory CERN is to bring its Accelerating Science travelling exhibition to the city, CERN’s director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer announced in Dublin last Friday during the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF).

CERN has been splayed all over the news of late since its physicists revealed on 4 July that their experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had found a boson that could be the Higgs boson particle.

Physicist Prof Sir Peter Knight has since claimed that the discovery of the boson is as significant to physics as the discovery of DNA was to biology.

“This is the physics version of the discovery of DNA. It sets the course for a brand new adventure in our efforts to understand the fabric of our universe,” said Knight.

So what will CERN’s Accelerating Science be all about? Aimed primarily at secondary school students, the exhibition apparently starts off by giving a history of the universe. Visitors to it will also get a chance to activate a model of the LHC to learn more about how a particle detector works and to find out what happens when particles collide in the LHC.

Speaking in Dublin on Friday, Rolf-Dieter Heuer said the exhibition shows how experiments at CERN explore the smallest and largest scales of the universe.

Boston Scientific is sponsoring the visit of the CERN exhibition to Galway. CERN is bringing the expo to the city in partnership with the Galway Science & Technology Forum. It will run from 16 September until 9 November at Leisureland in Salthill.

The exhibition will be open to schools from Monday to Friday and to the public at the weekends.

Carmel Doyle was a long-time reporter with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com