What is the universe made of? Israeli scientist takes reins at CERN

• Author: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN
• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Prof. Eliezer Rabinovici of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been searching for answers to questions like these for the past several decades.

Last month, he became the first Israeli professor elected to serve as the head of the Council of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research – a role that connects him and the State of Israel with hundreds of leading physicists worldwide who together conduct scientific experiments and research on these kinds of subjects.

"I am in the field of physics, and our goal is to find what are the basic constituents of matter, and what are the laws that govern it," Rabinovici told The Jerusalem Post in a Zoom interview this week. "It is a curiosity-driven field.... We are part of a breed that has it hard-wired in us that someone owes humanity simple and precise explanations that can be entered in one PowerPoint slide of what are the laws that govern the basic forces."

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CERN, LOCATED in Geneva, on the border of Switzerland with France, is the worldwide headquarters for such curious scientists.

On the one hand, the organization is at the frontier of quantum theory research – the theoretical basis of modern physics that explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic levels.

If you want to go to space but you do not have the money to pay for such a mission privately, then you either partner with the Kennedy Space Center or Baikonur, the launch base of all Russian-manned space missions, Rabinovici explained. If you want to reach the highest possible energy, the portal for that is CERN.

"CERN is a place where people from all over the planet gather to study the results of collisions at the highest possible energy," he said.

But there is also a "humanistic" aspect to the center, which was founded in 1954 by 12 member countries in the aftermath of World War II, when so many scientists were engaged in "killing or devising ways to kill each other or civilians and soldiers," Rabinovici said.

"People from all over the world cannot agree on what is the best music band, they cannot agree on what is the best football team, and nevertheless they succeeded to build together a piece of equipment that requires incredible compatibility,'' he continued, referring to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that was developed by CERN. "You have one piece in Michigan in the United States, one in Israel, one in...