• Question: which is the most biggest invention in the world

    Asked by anon-217583 to Savannah, Philippe, Lucy, Joanna, Harrison, Edoardo on 10 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      I would not choose an invention but, rather, a theory or discoveries. I would say that the thing I find the most important is our knowledge of the structure of matter and fundamental interactions. That is what constitutes matter and why the trajectory of an electron is going to be bent by a magnet or how two colliding black holes are going to produce waves that we can detect for example. Of course, all that knowledge implies things that have paved the way for many great inventions that have changed the world.

    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      I would say one of the biggest inventions in terms of size is probably the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN! It is the world’s biggest physics experiment and is a big ring of magnets that has a circumference of 27 km, designed to accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light – if you ran all the way around it, you would have run more than a half marathon in distance! The LHC is basically the world’s biggest fridge as it has to be kept at a temperature of -271.3°C to run properly (brrrrrr). If you added all of the wire filaments up in the LHC, they would stretch to the Sun and back six times with enough left over for about 150 trips to the Moon – a crazy amount of engineering went into building this thing!
      The particles are made to collide at four interaction points around the ring. Specially designed detectors are at these interaction points to measure what happens when the particles collide so that we can study the physics behind what is happening. Even the detectors themselves are amazing feats of engineering and invention. The ATLAS detector is 25m tall (as tall as 5 giraffes!) and weighs nearly as much as the Eiffel Tower in Paris!
      The LHC itself isn’t the end of the story though – when it is running, there are 600 million particle collisions a second which means there is LOADS of data to look at. In fact, there is so much data to sort and analyse that we can’t possibly do it all at CERN. Therefore, there is a worldwide “grid” of computer networks that the data gets sent to for storage and analysis.
      All of this makes up a pretty big invention!

    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Clean water! That has yielded the greatest benefit to mankind than any other.

    • Photo: Joanna Huang

      Joanna Huang answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Literally? Maybe the Knock Nevis – this humongous ship that’s bigger than the Empire States building. It’s almost 500 meters long (!!). In a non-literally sense, I suppose one of the biggest inventions is the world wide web, which is what we’re using now! This was actually a by-product invention of CERN 🙂

    • Photo: Edoardo Vescovi

      Edoardo Vescovi answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      To make it easier, I draw a line between discoveries (= find things that already existed before humans actually found them) and inventions (= human-made things that didn’t exist beforehand). I’d name writing because it keeps record of anything imaginable in human history, so that each person has never to re-discover and re-invent from scratch. Writing makes possible to see things changing as time flows, speak “back in time” with people lived before us and learn from them. I like to see books and other forms of communication, like internet nowadays, as a natural evolution.

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