by Alberto Aparici
On April 7, 2022, Dr. in Particle Physics Alberto Aparici gave us the opening talk of our Physics congress “Science is all around”. Dr. Aparaci is a great scientific communicator and collaborates in several radio programs (La Brújula and Más de Uno on Onda Cero) explaining science to the general public. He also works at the IFIC, which is a joint center of the University of Valencia and the CSIC specialized in particle physics, nuclear physics and cosmology.
His talk focused on explaining to us how science had advanced from the beginnings of chemistry (with Lavoisier or Mendeleev) to physics, in order to explain the world when classical physics ends and how particle physics begins.
For 1 hour he was making us doubt all those theories that, explained in secondary school, seem absolute truths and as knowledge progresses, new truths appear, which will be until someone proves otherwise. It was exciting to see how he delved into particle physics and almost without realizing it we had advanced from Thomson to Rutherford and from there to several dozen particles that we did not know. He brought us closer to the concept of the types of forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. We saw how these forces were necessary to understand particles and matter. From there he led us to the appearance of antimatter and its necessity. He told us about Quarks like the neutron, leptons like the electron, bosons and the special case of the Higgs boson.
With great mastery, he left us wanting to know more about the subject, moving towards particle physics for some and the conviction that this world is very complex for others. This is the purpose of these inaugural talks. Approaching worlds beyond the reach of our students’ knowledge so that they ask themselves questions and see that basic science solves many of the everyday problems that we face on a day-to-day basis.
After the talk, and the students’ questions and doubts, Dr. Aparici took us to see some of the IFIC laboratories:
– ANTARES/KM3NeT is a neutrino astronomy experiment. That is, they observe the sky but using particles.
– ATLAS is one of the LHC experiments at CERN. In this laboratory they work on the silicon detectors of the experiment, so they mainly do electronics design and they have a clean room, a laboratory with filtered air so that it has a low amount of dust, to assemble that electronics.
– In the Nuclear Physics laboratory they are experts in exotic nuclei (unstable nuclei that live for a very short time). What they do is produce these nuclei in experiments and study their properties. Right now they are preparing an experiment that they are going to take to a laboratory in Europe (I don’t know if it is CERN or Finland).
– The Grid is the distributed computing network associated with CERN. In Valencia we have a small node with a few thousand CPUs that students will be able to visit. It is quite a peculiar place.
For the students and teachers of the “Science is all around” project, it was an impressive, motivating and clarifying experience of how sciences are united to be able to solve the questions that nature poses to us.
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