At the Frontier of Research

We live in a world where it seems that everything has been explored - there are no white spots on our maps any more, practically everything seems to be understood, and when we do not understand something ourselves then for sure there is some expert somewhere who does. The unexpected, the surprising vanished from our daily lives long ago, and we have forgotten that it is far from self-evident to have an answer for everything.

But is all this true?

Although the modern world with all the wonders of our technology often obscures the view of the still undiscovered wonders of nature, they are still there: this is the frontier, the limit of our present-day human knowledge. It is no longer a geographical limit as it used to be at the time of Christopher Columbus when  continents were still waiting to be discovered. Today, the frontier is in the smallest things we know, which are much smaller than an atom, and in the largest structures we see when we look at our universe. And surprisingly, both paths eventually lead us to the same fundamental questions that have not been answered yet.

In this section of our webpage, we try to provide some insight into "our" frontier of research, the field of elementary particle physics. We also discuss the question of the importance of fundamental research in our society. Technology deserves a section of its own since fundamental research is always the precursor of the hi-tech of our future - the highly demanding experiments continually push the limit of what is technologically feasible. What was initially developed for a purely scientific use is now frequently available in  surprising  applications for common use quite soon after its invention. Spin-offs of this research sometimes influence our daily lives much more than most of us believe.