Who Cares About Particle Physics?

This talk will help make sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Dr. Gagnon�explains in simple terms the latest discoveries from CERN and shows how the theoretical model called the Standard Model describes the basic constituents of matter. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 brought in the last missing piece of the model, but it is still incomplete. It only describes visible matter (that is, everything we see in stars and galaxies), but leaves out dark matter, a mysterious type of matter five times more prevalent but still completely unknown. She�will show how current experiments at CERN and elsewhere are trying to find out what dark matter is and which theory lies beyond the Standard Model.