eLearning Collaborative

    Kathy Copic works as a postdoc here at CERN, she has been working here for about a year with Colombia University. She helps graduate students with their work, and helped build ATLAS. She literally was sitting next to ATLAS, with a wrench and a few other people. Copic has become a specialist in one small part of ATLAS. When the LHC begins to run and something odd is occuring, she will be able to tell if it is her part that broke and she will be the one to help fix it. By studying her part, she knows what it will look like when it is working incorrectly. There are millions and billions of parts within ATLAS; people specialize in specific parts in case a piece breaks they will be more likely to identify the problem and fix it quickly.

    Although the LHC is one of the most complex, if not THE MOST COMPLEX, thing humans have ever developed...they are attempting to  answer the most basic science questions. Such as, whats everything made of? It's important for students, and people, to realize that science is not all memorization of facts and scientists that lived hundreds of years ago. Science is still happening and most importantly, questions are still being answered. As long as we still have questions left to ask, there will still be science left to do. 

    Copic personally would like to see an improvement in our standard model. She believes that particles are much like the periodic table of elements, in that they can all compare to one another having both similarities and differences, trends, and patterns. She hopes that they will find a pattern between all the particles, why some have mass and others don't. 

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