Some of the brightest minds from a variety of scientific fields gathered at CERN this month to give talks at an independently organized TEDx event, TEDxCERN. Following the theme “multiplying dimensions,” many of the talks covered the latest news in particle physics, including glimpses into international science, big data and, of course, the Higgs boson. George Smoot, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted.
At the May 4 event, an enthusiastic crowd of 600 people cheered on the speakers from CERN while more than 1300 others joined the fun through a live webcast. Now, CERN has posted videos of the talks online for those who were unable to join the first time around.
Some highlights for the physics fan:
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Hiranya Peiris: A cosmologist on the Planck collaboration speaks about the earliest light we can see and how it might help us understand more about the big bang.
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Ian Foster: The director of the Computation Institute, a joint collaboration between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, speaks about grid computing.
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Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers: Two members of the collaboration for the SESAME synchrotron light source, currently under construction in Jordan, speak about how science trumps politics in their international organization.
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Steve Myers and Andrew Vanden Heuvel: The CERN director of accelerators and technology and a physics teacher from Michigan demonstrate how they used Google Glass to take students on a trip to the Large Hadron Collider (and on a bike ride through it).
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Gian Giudice: A theoretical physicist at CERN speaks about what the Higgs mass might tell us about the fate of the universe.
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Becky Parker: The head of Physics Simon Langton Grammar School, whose students make up 1 percent of all the undergraduate physics students in the United Kingdom, speaks about inspiring students.