Fire It Up - Changing Our World
What will happen to the Earth as we know it? Will we blow up? Are scientists dabbling in God's no-fly zone?
On Wednesday, Sept 10th, the world as we know it may change.
CERN (Council for European Research Nuclear) will fire up the LHC, which stands for Large Hadron Collider, a huge particle accelerator, the world's largest ever. There are more than 2,000 physicists from all over the world working on this project. It is a 17 mile long tunnel of super-conducting magnets, 100 miles beneath the surface on the earth, looping from Switzerland into France and back again.
Fire it up, means they will collide two beams of subatomic particles, moving in opposite directions, and meeting in the center of the detector with enormous energy, which will give birth to a spray of new particles, perhaps some that no one has seen before. Some say it is capable of reproducing energies present just after the big bang, which means the particles will swirl around the tunnel at the speed of light. I've heard someone say it would be the equivalent of 200 pound of TNT. When the accelerator is running, collisions will occur 600 million times a second.
Some Physicists say they're not sure what will emerge from those collisions, but feel sure it safe. Others say it is also possible they will make miniature black holes, and still others say they will discover new dimensions of space-time.
Alvaro De Rujula, a staff physicist at CERN, says the machine will probe what he calls "the vacuum of space." He went on to say, "Now that sounds very peculiar, but the vacuum, surprisingly, is not empty. There is a difference between vacuum and nothingness. Take a room and take everything out, and take the light out, and people out, and air out. When you think it is truly, truly empty - it isn't empty. It can still contain a substance, which is the vacuum, which is not entirely empty in some sense."
Still others say this is a search for the God Particle, noting that Einstein explained gravity. But he didn't explain why things have mass in the first place....... "We think that the masses of particles are a sort of friction with the vacuum," De Rujula says. "They do not travel freely with the vacuum, but interact with it in some way."
A few non-scientists have been worried that physicists are getting a little too close to God for comfort. They're worried that this experiment could destroy the Earth via miniature black holes. De Rujula describes miniature black holes as particles of extraordinary density compared to usual objects, and says black holes would certainly be interesting, because they would be evidence for extra tiny dimensions of space-time. But he doesn't think they are likely to appear. And if they do, they'll be harmless.
I also heard some talk about how this machine could speed up data transfer to make DSL look like slow motion. Perhaps it will even speed up human transportation, which would give the phrase, "Beam me up, Scottie," a whole new twist. Then there's the rumors about a time machine coming out of this latest science project.
What do you think about this project?
Two tests have already been performed, one for each beam. On Wednesday the first actual collision will take place and you can watch it live via webcast.
http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html
Upcoming events
3 October:
CERN will host the LHC Grid Fest, a celebration of the LHC Computing Grid, a global computing grid designed to handle 15 million gigabytes of LHC-related data every year. The day will feature presentations, demonstrations, tours of the CERN Computer Centre and more. Click here for more details
21 October:
CERN will host the Official Inauguration of the LHC with representatives of CERN member and observer States.
(This is a follow up to the article about my Grandson's obsession with the world's latest science project)
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Comments: 25
Gather Broadcasting: Have it your way
That and a buck might buy a cup of coffee, but how can they implement this without being certain of the consequences? We are still learning about effects from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I grew up around particle accelerators and all that - Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, Berkeley......
And I'm still here.
Those physicists -
They're called, you know - so many of them are ministers and priests/priestesses - simply serving the creative force in what we may at first think is a mechanical fashion. But they get sooooo excited, so inspired - and it's a holy thing, that creative teamwork. Yes, they make some messes.
And yes, they're called.
Now it's up to the rest of us to set our mental powers in a thoughtform of "no harm." We're the balance.
I don't worry about the world ending. If it did, I'd just disintergrate and maybe be something else, somewhere else in the universe.
I think this is all really facinating, to be honest. I'm wondering, if things speed up, can man keep up. Or..... will man be forced to change with times?????? Not so long ago we were walking, then driving, then flying. Did our ancestors imagine what a Honda might look like. I doubt a time machine even crossed their minds. But, it would be pretty cool, to be able to travel farther into space in less. Right now it would take us a million years to get anywhere outside the galaxy, but maybe this machine will help us travel outside our Earth time zone.
To Jennifer, I don't believe science and God have no part with each other. God's mind is science oriented - He created the particle, and made everything from that dust. God is Einstein times infinity.