Description
The quest for the very fundamental mysteries of nature by
exploring the smallest scales and highest energies at
particle colliders requires a huge technological and
intellectual effort.
While many people think this is a purely intellectual
exercise for some crazy super-brains without any impact on
society, the spin-offs from High Energy Physics research
actually has and will have a number of consequences also for
non-scientists.
The most famous example is the World Wide Web which has its
roots at CERN. It clearly has revolutionized nearly
everybody's life. The huge amount of data collected at the
next generation of accelerator experiments led to the
development of grid technology, i.e. computing power and
storage ''out of the plug'' in a world wide grid of computer
centres.
Accelerator and detector development has led to progress in
medical imaging and radiation therapy.
Very powerful regularised neural network algorithms
developed for reconstruction and statistical analysis of
high energy physics experiments have been proven to be
extremely good prediction and risk assessment methods. These
now have first applications in banks, insurances, car and
steel industry as well as trading companies.
The lecture describes the major ideas of some important
spin-offs and their consequences for society. Finally
career possibilities for physicists outside public research
are described.
Author
Michael Feindt
(Institut fuer Experimentelle Kernphysik)
