Right, here we go. Tomorrow they switch on the CERN Large Hadron Collider for the first time. Many of you may know about this awesome piece of technology by way of Dan Brown already (it's in Angels and Demons, and Tom Hanks was there recently to film a few scenes for the movie version), but here's a little excerpt from Wikipedia, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about...
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of...protons. Its main purpose is to explore the...current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was invented by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
The collider is currently...being cooled down to its final operating temperature of approximately 1.9 K (−271.25 °C)...the first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for 10 September 2008, at 7:30 GMT and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21 October 2008.
When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, dubbed the "God Particle", which is the only elementary particle that has never been observed by science, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.
...it tries to recreate and emulate conditions that were there at the birth or starting of the universe, or just after the Big Bang...
The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground...It crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although most of it is in France.
The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1,232 bending magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 focusing magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at the operating temperature...
The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. At this energy the protons have a gamma factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.99% of light speed. It will take less than 90 microseconds for a proton to travel once around the main ring (a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second).
The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion.
Concerns have been raised in the media and through the courts in 2008 about the safety of the Large Hadron Collider, on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the accelerator might cause disastrous events, including the production of dangerous micro black holes and strangelets.
Martin Rees, who is a physicist, has calculated that the probability of the Large Hadron Collider causing a global catastrophe or black hole is 1 in 50 million, but has since stated, "My book has been misquoted in one or two places, I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."
So, this thing is absolutely gigantic, and no-one really knows what's going to happen when they switch it on tomorrow. I'm pretty sure the world is likely to end at 7:30am. COOL. But the science and the scale of this project is actually more impressive even than its portrayal in popular fiction. Check out these websites...
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/the-large-hadro.html
http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=lhc-to-switch-on-early-tomorrow-ami-2008-09-09
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR07.08E.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2710348/Stephen-Hawking-Large-Hadron-Collider-vital-for-humanity.html
http://www.lhc.ac.uk/latest-news.html
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
Anyway, if the world ends, then I'm glad to have met you...and what a world it was.
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