Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Question - 187

The story behind the 3 sketches (viewed as a series - top left, top right and then bottom left) is supposedly this - a famous politician told a scientist requesting funding for a project that if he can explain what the project does in a way that the politician can understand, he would get the money. He illustrated the concept using these sketches in a way a politician would appreciate and got the funding. However, the project suffered a major setback due to the incident shown in the last visual. Identify the project (the above story might be apocryphal. I couldn't find multiple sites verifying it).

Answer: The sketches explain the role the Higgs boson (God particle) plays in the Standard Model in giving elementary particles their masses. The scientist (Brian Cox) used a cocktail party analogy to explain this to Margaret Thatcher (who can be clearly seen in the bottom left visual). For more details, go here. The last visual shows the damage caused by the recent accident at the LHC that has set the project back several months. Keshav was the only one to get this one. Bravo.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the large hadron collider?