![]() Henry Frisch, professor of physics at the University of Chicago, remembers well an undergraduate electromagnetism course in which, based on test scores, one student "was just head and shoulders above all others." In college, though, he got hooked on physics. He was interested in glassblowing and, to further his work, Incandela considered becoming a chemist. He wanted to know, if you take everything away, what would there be? It's a topic he's still exploring: The composition of empty space.Īt first, art seemed his likely path while. Incandela's wonderment about the universe began in childhood. More about the LHC: Inside CERN's $10 billion collider "And this may actually be the beginning of a much more radical technological revolution than anyone has anticipated in terms of computing and knowledge." "In our field, we're often at the front of something," he said. This is already happening among scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the World Wide Web was invented. We sat at a table near the door as the physicist - whose hair, pants and blazer were all shades of gray - animatedly explained his vision of the future: A world of even greater interconnectedness of people and information, using a vast network of computers to solve new problems. before getting a dog (he's picked the name Petabyte). No wonder he's waiting to settle back in the U.S. Just this week, he's flown between Stockholm, Geneva and New York. Overseeing the CMS experiment has kept Incandela, 57, too busy to notice the view of the Alps out his office window. He steps down at the end of this month, and will leave Switzerland in August to return to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of physics. Incandela sported a tux for the banquet and snapped a photo with Higgs.Īttending the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm was one of many thrills of Incandela's tenure as CMS spokesperson, a position akin to CEO of the experiment. The machine was designed to recreate conditions around the time of the birth of the universe, to look for evidence of our origins, including the Higgs boson.įrancois Englert and Peter Higgs received a Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for coming up with theories about the all-important particle. CERN's $10 billion Large Hadron Collider sits in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border, and will smash protons at energies of 13 trillion electron volts in 2015, after upgrades. The experiments that found it - ATLAS and CMS - lie at opposite ends of the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. Lederman wrote that while "Goddamn Particle" might have been a more appropriate title, the publisher wouldn't allow it. Physicist Leon Lederman's book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" gave it that nickname, which scientists actually hate. Known to the general public as "the God particle," the Higgs boson helps explain why matter has mass, and therefore why we're here at all. Incandela leads the team for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two towering wonders of modern engineering that detected an important particle called the Higgs boson. To explore the universe's past, Incandela has been thinking at the edge of the future. It's a bold statement coming from someone who has spent decades collaborating on new technologies and inventive ways of solving problems. "Take anything I tell you with a grain of salt," he told me recently at his office near Geneva, Switzerland, paraphrasing the presentation. So he was surprised by an invitation to speak to businesspeople last year about predictions for 2013. ![]() Geneva, Switzerland (CNN) - One trillionth of a second after the Big Bang is the timeframe that physicist Joe Incandela knows well. He co-announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012. ![]() Incandela was involved in the discovery of the top quark.The experiment is located at the LHC, the particle-collider on the French-Swiss border.Joe Incandela has been the leader of the CMS experiment for two years.
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