(Repost @design.emergency) Will we ever get to the bottom of the universe? On 12/15/2021, NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and the Canadian Space Agency launched the James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana. JWST is the “largest and most powerful space science telescope ever constructed.” A five-layered sun shield keeps it at below -233 °C to intercept any heat interference from the Sun, so the observatory’s infrared radiations will be able to see deeper and farther in space––and thus in time––than ever before, thanks to their long wavelength. What’s in a boson? A whole universe, as it turns out. The 2013 documentary Particle Fever follows the Large Hadron Collider––the storied particle accelerator run in Switzerland by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)––from the day it first came online in 2008 to the day in 2012 the team successfully identified the Higgs boson––one of 17 fundamental particles from the Standard Model on whose existence physicists have built their theory on the behavior of the universe, and the last to be discovered. Suspense, made even more dramatic by the historical tension between experimental and theoretical physics, builds up with each progressive experiment until that moment of discovery and glorious collective joy. After a first shutdown, a second cycle, and another 4-year hiatus for upgrades, the third round of experiments recommenced at LHC on July 5. Yesterday, JWST beamed its first images from a perch 1.5 million km away from Earth, strategically positioned at a point that allows it to move in stable orbit with the Earth and the Sun––L2, from 19th-century physicist Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s theory of the three-body problem. In this Powers-of-Ten moment of entanglement at the limits of the known world, the curiosity, relentlessness, and optimism of science lift us from the self-inflicted misery that surrounds us at the human scale. Images: one of JWST’s first images (NASA); rendering of JWST (Northrup Grumman/NASA); JWST’s orbit; aerial view of the LHC (CERN); still from Particle Fever, Mark Levinson, 2013. #cern #designemergency #jwst #nasa #lhc #esa #particlephysics #spaceexploration