The American weekly magazine TIME has selected CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva as one of the 25 inventions to be included in the TIME Best Inventions Hall of Fame.
Every year, TIME searches for the most exciting innovations to compile its annual list of best inventions. To mark the 25th anniversary of the list, they have narrowed down the previous best inventions to the 25 most iconic and influential. These groundbreaking inventions were each chosen for their originality, ambition and impact.
The LHC began operating in 2008 as the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator and was included in TIME’s list of best inventions for that year. Countless innovations and inventions were needed to realise this ambitious project. When the idea for the LHC began to take shape in the early 1980s, many technologies, such as superconducting magnets, ultra-high vacuums and cryogenics, had to be significantly improved to support an accelerator of this size.
Nikhef is closely involved in three of the four main detector experiments at the LHC: ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE.
Because the LHC pushes the boundaries of scientific research, it requires and inspires innovation. This has been made possible thanks to the enormous international collaboration of scientists, engineers and technicians from more than 110 countries.
Since the start of operations, the LHC has observed the elusive Higgs boson in 2012 and discovered a whole range of exotic hadrons. Today, it continues to deepen our understanding of the building blocks of our universe, known as the Standard Model. Because of this long-lasting impact and nearly two decades of fundamental research, TIME has recognised the LHC as one of the greatest inventions of this century.
Source: CERN
