UCL is 200 years old this year, and there is a lot to celebrate. Physics and asronomy have been here since the start.

The funny-shaped little buildings in the main quad (in front of the Slade School of Fine Art) housed telescopes once upon a time, before light pollution presumably made us move that from Bloomsbury to Mill Hill.

On the North Circular.

Amazingly that still works, although its impact these days is mainly (though not entirely) on education and teaching. We do have telescopes in Chile and other places as well.

Particle physics features strongly in the celebrations too. The clip above from our light show “UCL Illuminated” shows what is intended to be an LHC collision on our portico.

This celebrates our involvement in the Higgs boson discovery, and the fact that Peter Higgs was a lecturer here before he moved to Edinburgh. You can tell the lightshow was not made by us physicists since it refers to the “God Particle” which of course we never do. Somehow that makes it all the more gratifying to see it there though.

There is a commemorative book available, free to access (or for a small fee if you want a physical copy). I wrote a piece for it about UCL’s history with bosons. That’s a fairly arbitrary choice of thread to choose through our particle physics history, and misses a lot out, but it does cover the Higgs, as well as our discovery of weak neutral currents (ie the Z boson) at the Gargamelle experiment at CERN. It also allowed me to say something about our measurements of the W boson, of photon structure and of the gluons inside the proton. So it seemed to make some kind of sense.

There are lots of other interesting contributions in the book from other colleaues in physics and from across the whole intellectual breadth of UCL. Well worth a look, I think.

And Happy Easter.