Large Hadron Collider is Online

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the acronym of its earlier incarnation Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire [CERN], fired up its multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider [LHC] for the first time yesterday. Its mission is to smash protons together near the speed of light to see what the wreckage is. The results could be the discovery of new subatomic particles like the Higgs Boson, which is the key to particles acquiring mass.

The LCH is a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel circling under the Franco-Swiss border. Today’s test firing had beams of protons headed in one direction controlled by superconducting magnets. In a few months, the beams will be fired in the opposition direction, and then simultaneously to create the collisions the physicists want. CNN says, “The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project's price tag of nearly $4 billion.” It’s such a big deal that Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University physicist attached to CERN, has a not-bad rap about it on YouTube.

Some, lacking an understanding of what is going to happen, have raised unfounded fears that the LHC will create black holes that can swallow the earth. CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis said “It will be extremely exciting if the LHC did produce black holes. OK, so some people are going to say, ‘Black holes? Those big things eating up stars?’ No. These are microscopic, tiny little black holes. And they’re extremely unstable. They would disappear almost as soon as they were produced.”

The truth is that the cosmic rays in space are vastly more energetic than the LHC’s activities, and they don’t result in persistent black holes. “The experiments that we will do with the LHC have been done billions of times by cosmic rays hitting the earth,” Ellis said. “They’re being done continuously by cosmic rays hitting our astronomical bodies, like the moon, the sun, like Jupiter and so on and so forth. And the earth’s still here, the sun’s still here, the moon’s still here. LHC collisions are not going to destroy the planet.”

What is particularly exciting is the search for the Higgs boson. If found, the discovery of the so-called “God Particle” would be a big step forward in physics. The folks at CERN are pretty sure that they will find it very shortly after the LHC is fully operational, or they won’t find it at all. If they don’t, an entire generation of physicists will have to re-think the nature of matter and energy. Either way, it will be a great intellectual adventure.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home