I don't even know where to begin. Particle physicists here are buzzing, and I would even go so far as to say giddy and glowing, over the impending end to construction on CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this August. (You know the one I'm talking about: the giant Swiss installation where they're gonna shoot two beams of protons at each other and try to re-create the Big Bang.) The excitement is contagious and once the $3 billion project gets rolling we're going to finally figure out if our laws of physics and nature are correct. Here are some tidbits the physicists were beaming about today:
Construction Oddities and Bits of Humor (That's nerd humor, so don't get too excited.)
First, according to Albert De Roeck, a scientist at CERN who participated in construction and planning, the ATLAS experiment alone will have over 1,800 miles of cables. Which means, he says, that "the chance of one cable being connected wrongly is 100%." Ha ha. Nerd. (OK, I laughed too.)
Once the LHC is complete it will create proton collisions every 25 nanoseconds. Ultimately, the data recorded from those collisions--1 million Gigabytes every year--during the 10 to 20 years of the LHC's life will equal all of the words spoken by humankind since our appearance on earth. I'm not completely sure I believe that figure, as it seems a bit difficult to calculate considering early language must have been merely a series of grunts, but there you go.
Finally, the Geneva-based LHC spans nearly 17 miles of tunnels running under villages and townships, proving that, as CERN scientist Philip Bryant notes, "if you are a landowner in France you own the land down to the Earth's core. If you're a land owner in Switzerland you own the land, but only to a reasonable depth."
Certainties and Uncertainties
Several of the physicists have gone so far as to say that LHC will, without question, detect the Higgs Boson (or the God Particle which is responsible for creating life, the universe, and everything). But they also say that the device could eventually help us confirm supersymmetry (the idea that all the particles we know of have partners), reveal tons of new particles that we haven't seen yet (two times what we have seen, to be exact), create dark matter or candidate particles that become dark matter, prove that there are more then three dimensions, and possibly even discover the graviton (the particle that creates gravity).
Oh, and all this research could even create a few quantum black holes. But don't worry, quantum black holes are "harmless to the environment," according to De Roeck, who says that they decay almost immediately...theoretically. The neat part about creating quantum black holes is that they can be used to study quantum gravity and perhaps explain what a black hole is.
One Super-Gigantic Particle Collider Is Not Enough
Now that construction on the LHC is nearly done and experiments will actually begin, the particle physicists have proposed another collider. Still in the planning phases, the International Linear Collider (ILC) will shoot electrons and their anti-matter counterparts called positrons at one another. The 18 mile-long tunnels will cost nearly $6.7 billion and perform 14,000 collisions per second. These collisions will be more complicated then the LHC's as the device will collect 20 billion electrons and 20 billion positrons in bundles and then shoot the bundles at one another at nearly the speed of light. But the increased difficulty creates what Johnathan Bagger from Johns Hopkins University claims will be much cleaner and more precise science. If all goes well the ILC will be ready for construction in 2012. Assuming the world is still interested.
So why do this? Well, says Bagger, because if you discover the Higgs at the LHC, then you're going to need to prove it. And if you figure out that there are more dimensions than we perceive, then you're going to want to count them. Not to mention the fact that electrons are responsible for 50 percent of the standard model of physics. Shouldn't we be studying them too?
The fact is that for every gigantic collider/particle accelerator we build, and there have been at least four, the resulting science only creates more questions. With those questions come a need for bigger and better devices to understand our new discoveries. Doesn't it stand to reason that once the LHC gets up and running it will lead to revelations we haven't even imagined?
