Álvaro de Rújula

Theoretical Physicist at CERN

Member of the ream who proposed the Large Hadron Collider

Alvaro-Rujula
English · Spanish

Álvaro de Rújula is one of the most important theoretical physicists of the world. He is part of the team since 1977 at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), located in Geneva, Switzerland.

As a theoretical physicist, Álvaro de Rújula has addressed several key topics of this discipline, both in matters having to do with the internal structure of the atom as in matters of cosmology (study of the Universe) and astrophysics, especially the jets ray gamma as he tells, “are mysterious beams of light coming from all over the universe and the origin of which we have not finished yet to understand.”

Álvaro de Rújula attained a Doctor in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and has served as a professor at this university. He has also worked at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in Paris in 1985, Harvard University and is currently a professor at Boston University.

The CERN team launched the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful machine in the world (LHC in its English acronym) whose purpose is to reveal the infinitesimally small particles-and still-unknown who wrote the rules of everything that constitutes the cosmos today, during the first trillionth of a second after the big explosion which gave birth to the universe, known as the BIG BANG.

Whatever the forms of matter and forces and laws that governed the universe 14 billion years ago, come to life briefly one after another, and if all goes well, leaving their footprints in mountains of computers. Álvaro de Rújula belongs to the European Academy since 1991.

'The Higgs particle damn'

At this conference, physicist Alvaro de Rújula makes a journey through the history of this search and explained the importance of finding which has become known as the God particle, an incorrect translation of the damn particle (The goddamn particle) , the name by which Leon Lederman Nobel baptized in one of his books for its difficulty to be detected.

What is the universe?

How the universe formed? When did it all begin? How and when the Earth formed? How did life arise in it? The search for answers to these puzzles has guided the work of scientists over the centuries. In the submicroscopic level of elementary particles things are difficult to understand because they are too simple. We know, among other things, how stars work, how galaxies are born, how they generated the various chemical elements and even how the universe was three minutes after birth.

We ignore, however, why elementary particles are as they are and the formula that gave birth to the Universe. Only know a tiny fraction of its ingredients. Among the issues raised major doubts stands empty, mysterious substance that far from being inert plays an important role both in the study of elementary particles and in the cosmology.