February 12 - PROF. SALLY HEATH- "The World's Largest Machine: What's it all about and is it proving Einstein wrong?"

The world's largest machine is the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, Switzerland in a seventeen mile long circular underground tunnel, part under French soil and part under Swiss soil. In the collider, two streams of particles, each with its own "track", are accelerated to a high speed as they travel around the seventeen mile loop in opposite directions until they are brought together in a head-on collision. This results in a spray of particles flying out from the point of impact. Last fall it was announced that measurements had been made indicating that neutrinos, one type of particle produced in collisions, were traveling at a speed slightly greater than the speed of light. A PowerPoint presentation containing numerous images of various parts of the Large Hadron Collider and computer images of collisions will provide to the layperson's a view of the various components of the world's largest machine, how it operates and the potential it holds for providing new scientific knowledge to the world.

Sally Heath earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in physics from U.C. Berkeley. As a full-time member of the Engineering/Physics Department, she taught physics at Santa Rosa Junior College for thirty-five years where she had the reputation of being an excellent teacher with the ability to engage and challenge community college students with widely varying levels of math/science sophistication. In her retirement she has been an avid participant in the OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) program at Sonoma State University both as a student and as an instructor. Sally has taught four physics courses in the OLLI program at SSU, most recently in the Spring 2011 Session when she taught a course entitled "20th Century Physics: On the Road to a Theory of Everything (but no arrival!)".