DIMENSIES, Nikhef’s Dutch language public magazine, is all about exploring boundaries this spring. In his foreword director Stan Bentvelsen calls the thirst for always wanting to look further “Scientific entrepreneurship”.
This spring edition, DIMENSIES includes a series of stories, each in its own way about pushing boundaries. In the series on Nikhef groups at Dutch universities, Groningen shows how it looks beyond existing knowledge in many ways, from the tiny electron to the entire cosmos.
Particle lab CERN will officially celebrate its 70th anniversary this autumn. In DIMENSIES, former research director Jos Engelen tells how at the Geneva lab the best researchers and technicians have always chased the unknown and often successfully. “In which not only discoveries are exciting, but also the verification of existing models”, Engelen says.
To this end, new time-sensitive sensor techniques are also now being worked on at Nikhef that continue to provide useful insight into the mishmash of colliding protons in accelerators. At the same time, a number of Nikhef researchers are collaborating on detectors for the largest neutrino beam ever, DUNE in the US. Frontier science.
The fact that science is the work of people is shown, for instance, in the interviews with the new leader of the LHCb programme Mara Senghi Soares and ATLAS contact person for diversity and inclusion Flavia de Almeida Dias. This is precisely where much remains to be gained and where transgressive behaviour is undesirable.
In this issue of DIMENSIES, we naturally also focus on the renovated Nikhef building at Amsterdam Science Park, which reopened at the end of February. A building made for meeting in and forging new groundbreaking plans, according to director Stan Bentvelsen.
Previous issues of the Nikhef magazine DIMENSIES are available online. Individual issues can be ordered at communications@nikhef.nl.
