After 20 years of planning and building and at a cost of around £5 Billion the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland gets switched on today. Basically it will send 2 streams of 50 billion protons flying around a 17 mile track at speeds of around 99.999,9991% of the speed of light in the hope that they crash into one another and confirm some theories of particle physics.
The particles will be doing 11,245 circuits of the track every second, eat your heart out F1/NASCAR. The data volumes being collected from the experiment are mind blowing, 15,000 terabytes per year and that is after they have discarded 99% of all observations after automated cursory checks.
It will attempt to confirm the existence of the theoretical Higgs boson particle, search for dark matter, confirm the number of dimensions which exist (10 or 11 according to theory) and a bunch of other stuff that makes my brain ache just trying to think about it.
It is unlikely that it will succeed today in sending around one stream all of the way round and is more likely that it will take a few months to calibrate.
Even if it succeeds in creating micro black holes the planet is not going to be swallowed by them today or at any point in the near future – even higher energy collisions occur in the upper atmosphere every day and the world has yet to end.
It is difficult to predict what good might come from this experiment apart from an increase/decrease in our understanding of particle physics, and some have argued that the money would have been better spent elsewhere.
I have two answers to that, firstly the project has had scientists and engineers from 40 countries working in cooperation for the last 20 years which is a good thing. Secondly and arguably more importantly if the project had never started I would not be writing this and you would not be reading it – Tim Berners-Lee invented the concept of the World Wide Web while working there.
If you are interested then you can read more here.
UPDATE
The first beam made it all the way round in less than an hour from startup which is pretty impressive, they expect to start getting their first collisions within a month or so, micro black holes here we come.
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5 comments:
Off and on the past month I've seen this in the news. Every time I hear about it I think: Torchwood. Heh.
rt, Weird, the BBC has made a 45 min Torchwood radio play set in the LHC which will be broadcast later today. They might make it available as a download check out Radio4.
I guess we didn't implode.
Cool! Thanks. :)
I'm listening to it right now. (I love having to use my imagination to visualize the program.)
Phlegmmy, Yep the world did not end, but the "crunch" comes when they manage to get the 2 beams to collide.
rt, Have always enjoyed listening to plays on the radio - it was a good listen.
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