Heading to CERN: Shropshire student to join top scientists
He is only 22, but a Shropshire physicist is set to join some of the world's most respected scientists in the search for the 'Theory of Everything'.
Elliot Reynolds will study at CERN in Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the source of some of the most important scientific findings in history, as part of his PhD.
The former Grange High School pupil, who lives in Farmlodge Lane in Herongate in Shrewsbury, has just graduated from University College Oxford with a first class Master's degree in physics.
Mr Reynolds' Master's thesis was titled 'Constraints on Supersymmetry from Higgs Boson production measurements at the LHC'. He will now begin his PhD at the University of Birmingham, working with Dr Kostas Nikolopoulos – a particle physicist whose work helped to discover the Higgs boson, also known as 'The God Particle'.
Starting in September, Mr Reynolds said he will be working on the Atlas Experiment – one of the two experiments that resulted in the discovery of the Higgs Boson.
At the conclusion of the first year Mr Reynolds would become a signed author of the experiment, with his name added to the world's leading particle physicists.
The second year will hopefully be spent at CERN in Geneva conducting his own analysis under Dr Nikolopoulos.
Mr Reynolds said he was delighted at the prospect and eager to do his bit to help with research into a theory which would be capable of linking and explaining all aspects of the universe. He said: "It is massively exciting. It is the dream really. It is exactly where I wanted to be now, doing real research, pushing the frontier of understanding. Just trying to do my little bit towards gaining the theory of everything."
Despite already having achieved a masters degree from the same university college which taught Dr Stephen Hawking, arguably Britain's most famous physicist, Mr Reynolds said he still has a long way to go.
He said: "I feel like having now gotten my Oxford degree and got into CERN that while it is an achievement getting here I still have Everest to climb in terms of what I want to do. I still have to prove myself.
"I am not content to be a member of CERN, I want to be like Kostas and make some great discovery, something bigger than landing at Geneva and being given my name tag for CERN. It is more about particle physics and the actual discovery for me.
"The big motivation is the theory of everything, that is the key to me. That we can have a single theory that explains everything, that from which everything else is a mere computation."
