They ponder the universe
Second in an occasional series on Harvard’s wide-ranging programs and research in Europe. GENEVA — Once you know enough math, Harvard Ph.D. student Tony Tong said, you get to know physics. And physics, he said, is simply amazing. “[Physics] is always helpful to answer the question of ‘Why?’ Why the skies are blue, why the universe is so big, basic stuff,” Tong said. “I’m always curious about those questions and the solution is always so beautiful.” Tong, it seems, had come to the right place. He was speaking on a warm July day in a small courtyard at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, the scientific campus on the outskirts of Geneva that is the world’s beating heart for high-energy particle physics. Home of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN made world headlines in 2012 when scientists announced the discovery of the...