NYU physicist Kyle Cranmer will outline the intricacies of the Large Hadron Collider, considered the world’s largest science experiment, at the 2011 World Science Festival’s Street Fair, to be held Sunday, June 5, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m, in Washington Square Park.

NYU Physicist Cranmer Speaks About Large Hadron Collider at World Science Festival’s Street Fair, June 5
NYU physicist Kyle Cranmer will outline the intricacies of the Large Hadron Collider, considered the world’s largest science experiment, at the 2011 World Science Festival’s Street Fair, to be held Sunday, June 5, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m, in Washington Square Park. Cranmer is among the scientists from NYU’s Experimental High Energy Physics group that is part of this world-wide collaboration. The collaboration, ATLAS, is based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that employs LHC.

NYU physicist Kyle Cranmer will outline the intricacies of the Large Hadron Collider, considered the world’s largest science experiment, at the 2011 World Science Festival’s Street Fair, to be held Sunday, June 5, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m, in Washington Square Park. Cranmer will conduct presentations, designed for audiences of all ages, throughout the day in the park’s southeast corner (Washington Square South and Washington Square East [Booth 8]).

Located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. This machine is probing a new frontier in high-energy physics and may reveal the origin of mass of fundamental particles, the source of the illusive dark matter that fills the universe, and even extra dimensions of space. 

By colliding high-energy beams in the centers of the LHC’s particle detectors, scientists hope to make discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. The debris of the collisions reveals the nature of fundamental particle interactions and may also contain as-yet undiscovered particles.

The energy density in these collisions is similar to that of the early universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Beyond revealing a new world of unknown particles, the LHC experiments could explain why those particles exist and behave as they do. They could reveal the origins of mass, shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe, and possibly find extra dimensions of space.

An estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries have helped design and build the accelerator and its massive particle detectors, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

Cranmer, an assistant professor of physics, is among the scientists from NYU’s Experimental High Energy Physics group that is part of this world-wide collaboration. The collaboration, ATLAS, is based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that employs LHC. Other members of the NYU team working on this project include Professors Andy Haas, Peter Nemethy and Allen Mincer and researchers Diego Casadei, Hooft van Huysduynen, Rostislav Konoplich, Attila Krasznahorkay, Sven Kreiss, George Lewis, Christopher Musso, Ricardo Neves, Kirill Prokofiev, and Long Zhao. 

For more on NYU’s involvement, go here and click on the “Atlas” tab.

The 2011 World Science Festival Street Fair will feature a program of interactive exhibits, experiments, games, and shows designed to entertain and inspire. Other performances and exhibits will include: Dancing Mad Scientist Jeffrey Vinokur; Franklin Institute’s Traveling Scientists; Central Park Zoo’s Wild Life Theater; characters from the Jim Henson Company’s Dinosaur Train and Sid the Science Kid television shows; American Museum of Natural History’s Moveable Museum—Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries; The Science of Ping Pong; What Lies Beneath: Science of Underwater Exploration; The Smell Lab: Test your smell IQ; The CSI Experience; and more. For additional information, click here.

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