“The Particles” brings scientifically accurate knowledge on Particle Physics  to the wide audience in a didactic way 

The São Paulo Research and Analysis Center (SPRACE) has just released the Portuguese version of the educational application “The Particles”.

Originally developed by Frank Close, physicist emeritus at Oxford University, the app aims to teach Particles Physics concepts in an innovative and exciting way. With FAPESP’s support through a Thematic Project,  SPRACE makes the application in Portuguese available for Android users for free.

 When launching the app, one of the main intentions of Close was to make scientifically accurate knowledge about Particle Physics easy and simple for a wide and diverse audience – from Elementary, High School or college students,  or even to people interested in the field, who had no scientific training. “I wrote several books on Particle Physics in my career and I thought it was time to introduce the information in the 21st century, making them available on portable devices through an application”, said the scientist, known for his commitment to scientific dissemination. Close was head of communication and public education of the Europen Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1997 and 2000, and  he is the author of several books, among them The Particle Odyssey: a Journey to the Heart of Matter.

When launching the app, one of the main intentions of Close was to make scientifically accurate knowledge about Particle Physics easy and simple for a wide and diverse audience – from Elementary, High School or college students, or even to people interested in the field, who had no scientific training. “I wrote several books on Particle Physics in my career and I thought it was time to introduce the information in the 21st century, making them available on portable devices through an application”, said the scientist, known for his commitment to scientific dissemination. Close was head of communication and public education of the Europen Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1997 and 2000, and he is the author of several books, among them The Particle Odyssey: a Journey to the Heart of Matter.

Close’s great initiative, however, remained only available in English for iOS operating system users and was on sale for $8. Noticing the small quantity of high quality Particle Physics content available in Portuguese, SPRACE obtained from the English publisher, Science Photo Library (SPL), the authorization to translate the application to Portuguese and make it available, in exchange for the English version for Android . This excellent content is especially important for many schools in our country, for which the curriculum in Physics is restricted to the knowledge obtained until the beginning of the 20th century, leaving aside practically all the discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. In a tentative of of bringuing these concepts to high school students, SPRACE is in contact with the Secretariat of Education of the State of São Paulo in order to make the application available on tablets which were distributed to schools. Aiming at making these concepts available for high school students, SPRACE is in contact with the Secretariat of Education of the State of São Paulo in order to spread the information about the application and distributed it in the schools.

Besides explaining these discoveries in a didactic way, “The Particles” also shows the knowledge generated over the last 100 years. The app explains, for example, the theory of the Standard Model, which deals with the fundamental particles that we know today and how they interact with one another. It is possible to learn about quarks, which form protons and neutrons, and about the latest scientific advances, such as the observation of the Higgs boson for first time in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN’s main particle accelerator.