Science Weekly: Christmas at the Large Hadron Collider

Assistant research scientist Prof Steven Goldfarb takes us on a trip around Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, home of the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is currently asleep, switched off for planned maintenance over the winter. We sneak into the control room of the Atlas experiment, linger in the corridor where the world wide web was invented and eavesdrop on particle physicists eating in the canteen ... to find out what particle physicists talk about over lunch. Some believe 2011 will be the year of the Higgs. We meet some of the physicists who perform on the album just released by Cern, Resonance . They include Lukas Pribyl , Nick Barlow and PhD student Genevieve Steele who plays the celtic harp. Watch an iPhone video recording of Genevieve performing. Find out the answers to questions like "do the lights dim when the beam is switched on?", and "what's the wi-fi access like in the room where the world wide web was invented?" If you want to know more about how the podcast was put together, we blogged about the trip at the time. Here are some pictures from around the complex on the Swiss-Franco border. With thanks also to Claudia Marcelloni . WARNING: contains strong language. Subscribe for free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed ). Meet our crack team of science bloggers : The Lay Scientist by Martin Robbins Life and Physics by Jon Butterworth Punctuated Equilibrium by GrrlScientist Political Science by Evan Harris Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science . Email [email protected] . Guardian Science is now on Facebook . You can also join our Science Weekly Facebook group . We're always here when you need us, listen back through our archive .