Science & Cocktails Johannesburg Date: 27 March 2018 Speaker: Sahal Yacoob (University of Cape Town) The puzzle of the Universe: The science of CERN's Large Hadron Collider What are we made of? Are we really made of stardust? Have we found the most fundamental pieces that make up the matter in the Universe? What is a quark - a fundamental particle or a kind of cheese? What is mass and how do particles get mass? What do large particle colliders like the LHC really do? And how many scientists does it take to find a new particle? The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 was a major milestone in our understanding of particle physics. Forty years after its proposal, the Standard Model of Particle Physics was finally complete. Or was it? Are there more particles out there and can we hope to find them? And why does it matter? In tonight's session of Science & Cocktails Johannesburg, Sahal Yacoob will take us on a captivating journey to discover the small number of different pieces which fit together to create the universe. He will describe how they combine together to give such a wide diversity and types of matter, and explain why we're still looking for more answers. This event was made possible thanks to financial support by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. http://www.scienceandcocktails.org/jozi https://www.facebook.com/scienceandcocktailsjozi @SciCocktailsJHB