LHC Machine Outreach

The LHC - why?
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"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood."  Stephan Jay Gould

Why? A good question.  The answer at CERN's public portal

We can justify the LHC's existence on a number of levels:

Fundamental research

Update March 2019 because this page was referenced by Sabine Hossenfelder (for whom we have a lot of respect!): the following list was put up a long, long time ago. Things have changed. The Higgs boson has been discovered, LHC results have, so far, showed no sign of Supersymmetry etc... interesting times. Please note the "might" below.

This is CERN's core business. With the LHC the aim is to continue to push our understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe. The results from the LHC might shed light on:

For a basic introduction see the Atlas physics tour

Education

A huge number of technical students, Ph.D.s, post-docs, associates etc. pass through CERN

Spin-offs

  • The World Wide Web for example

Knowledge transfer

Investment

International Relations

  • A truly remarkable international collaborative effort