LHC Anticipation and Excitement

This is in continuation of my previous post on LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

Cosmic Variance (one of my favourite science blogs) has been running a series of posts on the LHC and its related discussions. David E. Kaplan, who is going to be hosting a program on the LHC on the History Channel, has written this guest post about the LHC. Excerpts:

For many reasons this is an amazing moment in the history of science (many which have probably been repeated on this blog before).

There are roughly 75 countries with at least one institution (university or lab) which has contributed to the construction of this machine. The list includes strange bedfellows: India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran and the United States, Greece and Turkey, Russia and Georgia, all of western Europe, most of eastern Europe, some of northern Africa and south America, Japan, China, S. Korea, etc. This unlikely team has constructed the biggest single machine in the history of the planet after over 20 years since the first plans were laid. At 10,000 scientists, this project represents the modern day pyramids.

This is the kinda stuff that makes this one of the biggest scientific experiments ever conducted by mankind! To give you a scale of the things involved, the LRC Homepage has listed out a series of facts about the experiment:

- The vacuum in the LHC is comparable to outer space, if it were a car tyre with a leak, there are so few gas molecules that it would take 10 000 years to go flat.
- When protons arrive in the LHC they are travelling at 0.999997828 times the speed of light. Each proton goes around the 27km ring over 11 000 times a second.
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN could be the most ambitious scientific undertaking ever. The results of LHC experiments will probably change our fundamental knowledge of the universe.
- A nominal proton beam in the LHC will have an energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1700 kph.

Check out all the other facts here.

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September 9, 2008 @ 2:05 am

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or man’s first big attempt to answer one of the biggest questions of mankind

Man has now succeeded to set up one of his biggest experiments ever to understand the fundamentals of our universe and its creation.

The Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator in physics-speak, is now ready and will be circulating its first beams tomorrow, September 10th.

To make this seem a bit simple, what essentially happens in a particle accelerator is, well, acceleration of sub-atomic particles. The experiment at LHC will accelerate protons to reach somewhere very close to the speed of light. These accelerated fast moving (really fast moving!) protons will collide with each other and give rise to an environmental condition close to what was present during the genesis of our universe – the big bang.

It will then be upto the thousands of scientists involved in this project to collect data, analyze and propose various theories on why the universe started, how it settled into what it is today and what could possibly be the future. I am simply in awe of the fact that we have become intelligent enough to simulate conditions of the beginning of the universe and have set up this LHC.

The LHC has been set up on the outskirts of the border between France and Switzerland. The tunnel has a circumference of 27 km.

There are some concerns from various quarters regarding the safety of planet earth due to such a massive experiment. It is important to note that when protons, with negligible mass, travel at velocities close to the speed of light, will generate enormous (the word is not big enough) amount of energy. Some sceptics claim that this energy would be so concentrated within a small area, that it could lead to the creation of a black hole and the entire earth could collapse into it.

Most scientists, however, dismiss this and are geared up for tomorrow when the LHC shall be switched on.

Read some more on LHC here: The Large Hadron Collider Official Homepage

Wikipedia article on LHC: Large Hadron Collider

This is the quote from The Guardian on the LHC:

“Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale.”

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