XIA Wei_CERN Summery

My name is XIA Wei, an architecture graduate student of University of Michigan. I appreciate that Panagiotis Charitos, Sandra Manninger and Matias del Campo offered this interesting course and arranged a perfect academic visit. I was super excited to participate the trip at CERN, and it was a great opportunity to see contemporary physicists’ work with the LHC.

Their research of exploring essence of gravity is really a big thing in architectural field, because structure is generated by gravitation and architectural structure is designed to against gravitation. To know what is gravity is to have more methods of construction. I would like to see there is one day human are not restricted by gravity any more. However, on another side, gravity is a gift of ruling the existing system.

I was surprised when Steve Goldfarb told us there is still about eighty percentages unknow matters in the universe, which means a huge opportunity in material domain. Architecture is stagnated in materials for a long term, although a lot of architects are working on it. From late 18^th century, concrete has occupied the dominant position for about 200 years; with increase of output, steel also joined the architectural material family for more than 100 years.

The experience in the superconducting cables laboratory is very fun. It was a rare chance to learn the properties of superconductor from the experiment in a closer distance, compared with just taking a maglev train. Also, in antimatter laboratory, Michael Doser introduced their work to prove the existence of antimatter. As he said, we know and pretty sure that it is there. Antimatter is a crazy thing, if the theory is true, it can disappear positive matters to create energy. It can be used as an energy source or a weapon. Is there another me in the anti-world?

It was an amazing experience to learn something I never thought about in my normal life, and the critical thinking about the basic science will influence my personal practical experience in architecture. Who is not a future scientist in childhood after all?