Lately I was accepted for the first ever CERN Class in the Philippines piloted at the National Institute of Physics. For those who have been a sleepyhead in the world of science, CERN, which in English stands for European Organization for Nuclear Research, is an institution whose objective is to operate the world largest experiment(and equally largest machine), the large hadron collider located at the northwest suburbs of Geneva Switzerland, along France-Swiss border. It is a mecca of physicists where it employs 90% of the world renowned physicists, science luminaries, and if not Nobel Prize awardees, mostly Nobel laureate. It's also a cradle of the world wide web and other scientific breakthroughs of our times, e.g., Positron Emission Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, grid computing, etc.
There were 500 or more applicants and only about a hundred were chosen. The demographics is widely diverse as some belong to the energy sector of physics, applied physics, medical physics, physics academe, etc.
While most lessons anchored on heavy and advance mathematical abstractions, that didn't wane the sparkle of interest in the audience. Most of us are physicists. I am the only one who belonged to the astrophysics sector, and while astrophysics is my field of specialization, topics of the same nature is already relatively a walk in the park for me.
Higgs has been one of the most relished points of discussion in class, and while it somehow framed the completion of the Standard Model, there are still questions left unanswered and to that, I wrote an article of where post Higgs science is heading. I wrote an article about it, mentioning other fascinating stuff of science as well, e.g., Dark Matter and Dark Energy to which I have been invited as a resource lecturer in several occasions by different science centers, massive Neutrinos, quantum gravity and String Theory.
Most of the experimental physicists though, such as the lecturers, suspend their beliefs on the String Theory which is a good thing to keep the balance between experimentation and theoretical postulation. And it's easier to debunk a theory than to prove of its existence.
