Ever since our great, great (etc.) grandparents busied themselves with throwing rocks at the sun and praying to the planets (or the other way around), we’ve been looking towards the heavens asking ourselves just what all that stuff is. From those humble beginnings, we, as a civilization, have taken great leaps forward in understanding the universe around us and the forces and laws that make it behave like it does.



Classical physics, often called Newtonian Physics, adequately describes much of the physical world we can observe here on Earth, but every question answered resulted in others that remained unknown. As we moved forward, modern physics gave birth to new fields which attempted to explain nature in its entirety, from the largest to the smallest scales. And much like most locks can be opened with a master key, physicists soon began wondering if there wasn’t a single unified theory that explained it all – from time to space to matter, both visible and dark.



In this pursuit, we have built machines that dwarf entire cities, harnessed energies that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and pushed the boundaries of what we know – and what we don’t know – further than they’ve ever gone. And still – every new question answered just raise more that need to be studied.



Don’t let it be said that scientists aren’t persistent.



To help us understand the latest results, the coolest tech and the most interesting work in this mind-bogglingly awesome field, we are very happy to welcome Dr. Richard Breedon to Bangkok Scientifique. Dr. Breedon has a doctorate in Experimental Physics from the Rockefeller University in New York, and is a Research Professor at the University of California, Davis. For more than three decades, he’s worked on numerous particle physics experiments at such internationally prestigious laboratories as Fermilab, the KEK Particle Physics Laboratory in Japan, and CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, where he has worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment since 1992. He will talk about his experiences in experimental particle physics, CERN, the CMS experiment, and the Higgs boson discovery.