Mark Thomson (physicist)

thumb|Mark Thomson in his CERN office Mark Andrew Thomson (born 28 April 1966) is a British particle physicist. He is a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. From January 2018 to December 2024, he was the Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, one of the nine councils of UK Research and Innovation. Thomson was a delegate of the United Kingdom to the CERN Council, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) and European Spallation Source ERIC (ESS). Thomson was appointed director-general of CERN on 1 January 2026. Quotes We are going to open a new window onto the universe that we haven’t had before. Quoted in Nuño Domínguez, Mark Thomson, physicist: ‘We are going to open a new window onto the universe that we haven’t had before’, El Pais, 6 November 2024. Q. The Higgs acts upon conventional matter. Is the rest of it totally unknown? A. That is the second question to answer. So about 5% of the universe, in terms of its mass, is the stuff we see, the visible universe. And then another 25% is what we call dark matter. We know it’s out there. We can kind of see its presence in the way it affects galaxies and the way galaxies move, but we really don’t know what it is. So that’s a very large part of the universe that we notice, but that we haven’t seen at all. Then there’s dark energy, which is the remainder, and who knows what that is, I’m not even going to go there. Quoted in Nuño Domínguez, Mark Thomson, physicist: ‘We are going to open a new window onto the universe that we haven’t had before’, El Pais, 6 November 2024. External links Thomson, Mark Category:1966 births Category:Living people Category:Physicists from the United Kingdom Category:University of Cambridge faculty Category:University of Oxford alumni