Brian Cox is known as a “rock star physicist”. Given he was in two bands, Dare and D:Ream, and is now a particle physicist, the moniker fits. These days he’s works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, where they’re planning on smacking protons together at incredibly high velocities to see what comes out. Particle physicists are hoping what comes out is the Higgs boson, which is one of the particles predicted by the Standard Model but has never been seen.

In this talk, Dr. Cox explains all this in eloquent fashion. He was invited to give this presentation at the 2008 TED Conference.

[tags]brian cox, large hadron collider, higgs boson, ted, atlas experiment, particle physics, science[/tags]