The Large Hadron Collider
November 15th, 2007The latest iteration of the world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, will be switched on in May 2008 (though the BBC documentary below says November, the time line has been updated).
It’s big, REALLY big, and expensive—costing over 6 billion dollars and crossing between the borders of France and Switzerland at four points. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories.
As a side note, CERN has had some impressive byproducts, including the web itself.
The BBC created a great documentary about it called The Six Billion Dollar Experiment. Enjoy.
Running time: 49 mins (in 5 parts on Youtube)
Hit play or watch Six Billion Dollar Experiment at YouTube.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I was just thinking about the documentary, about how Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson knew that the background noise they were picking up in their telescope was actually the last remnant of light from the big bang—14 billion year old light waves that had stretched across the universe?
They won the nobel prize for the discovery, but the documentary leads me to believe they came to that conclusion, “because it was the only explanation left”… I hate to say it, but if that’s the case, that doesn’t seem like good science.
This NPR story says that their discovery bolstered the idea that the universe began with a massive explosion 13 billion or 14 billion years earlier.
I hope the hypothesis that the big bang would have background radiation and their finding background noise in their telescope didn’t create an ironic feedback loop that actually took science in the wrong direction.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
In my personal opinion, I submit that the LHC at full pelt might, at least, cause the annihilation of our world.
Now, I’m not a mathematician: I’m not using math to calculate alpha decay rates, lepton orbital paths or the topology of n-dimensional knots.. ;
I dont need to be with something as grass-roots and fundamental as this; I’m using principles known to any bright school-kid.
It seems to me that if you can confine annihilated matter within the LHC: all well and good.
But if you completely annihilate just one atom in the LHC structure, such a single packet of such concentrated energy may be just enough to unravel everything around it in a non=stop second-order chain-reaction.
The equation for it is E=MC squared, and neither I, nor a million others need to be top-flight mathematicians to accurately predict it.
regards, stirling penn.
November 25th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
It’s beginning to sound more and more like string theory is probably not going to be the unifying explanation to the way the universe operates. And as such, it’s probably unlikely that the LHC will create the tiny black holes that some have suggested it might.
See these couple interesting links over at Ze Frank’s.