The $9 billion Large Hadron Collider, 20 years in the making, represents the work of at least 7,000 scientist, will be turned on, on Wednesday, 10 September 2008.
(Look at the size of this - see the small people there? That's how big it is. Doesn't it look like a time-machine portal like StarGate?)
The world's biggest, most highly anticipated physics experiment comes online this week, as the first beam of particles begins to circulate around a 17-mile underground race-track that lies beneath France and Switzerland.
The $9 billion Large Hadron Collider, 20 years in the making, represents the work of at least 7,000 scientists from 60 countries, including a contingent from the Boston area that spent years, or entire careers, working on this project.
Their excitement is testimony to the importance of the mission: to recreate in an underground tunnel the conditions of the early universe, just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. From that, they hope to fill in gaps in physics knowledge, search for hidden dimensions, and understand why particles have mass.
The Large Hadron Collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known by its French acronym, CERN. The circular underground tunnel, in which the particle beams ramp up to 99.99 percent of the speed of the light, lies more than 300 feet below the earth, at the foot of the Jura Mountains
One of physicists' most vexing unanswered questions is: What are the origins of mass in the universe? The answer may lie in a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson first predicted in 1964, that has been bugging scientists for decades. The elusive particle, also called the "God particle," was inserted into scientific theory to make physicists' models work, but it has never been seen.
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This appeared in The Straits Times, Singapore, 09 Sep 08 :
BIG BANG MACHINE SET TO POWER UP
It has been called an Alice In Wonderland probe into the make-up of the universe - or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday
The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come every closer to re-enacting the Big Bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.
The machine at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the make-up of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.
In the first stage of its commissioning process, the collider, installed in a 27km tunnel 91.4m under the French-Swiss border, will start unleashing a beam of protons tomorrow (10 Sep'08).
Two parallel beams of particles, one going clockwise and the other anti-clockwise, will blast around the underground ring recreating the conditions seen when the universe came into existence 14 billion years ago.
In cathedral-sized caverns located at four points in the ring, superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other under the gaze of detectors that will record the resulting sub-atomic debris.
This invisible rubble could help resolve some of the biggest questions in physics.
It will still be about a month before the beams are brought together in collisions but some sceptics fear the process could create micro "black holes", sub-atomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets.
In a safety assessment report released last week, CERN said any black holes produced would be "microscopic" and decay almost immediately as they would lack the energy to grow or even be sustained.
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This is rather exciting - will Man know how the universe actually began? Will this lead to other dimensions' portals and time-travel? Does this in any way tie in with 2012?
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