Credit: Mark Evans
Like some medieval cathedral, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already outlasted some of its builders and will continue in daily use long after most are retired or dead.
And just like those vaulted temples of worship, the LHC commands silent awe from its visitors. As it should. The LHC is the most complicated and expensive scientific experiment ever, with the audacious goal of explaining the ultimate nature of matter.
Just to build the apparatus is costing upwards of a$5 billion (US$3.6 billion). Planning started 20 years ago, the first applied research began 15 years ago, and more than a thousand engineers, technicians and scientists have already been working on this project for at least a decade.
Visiting this cathedral to science, however, isn’t that simple. It’s hidden from most eyes, buried 80 to 100 metres deep as an oval tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva, enclosing an area big enough to squeeze in Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities.
There are occasional surface outcroppings – anonymous metal-sided sheds set well back from the roads. And there is a large jumble of nondescript off-white buildings that house the designers, builders and eventual users in a campus-like setting near the France-Switzerland border. But mostly there are cultivated fields, cud-chewing cows and placid villages, with the LHC’s tunnel passing below unseen and largely ignored..
Yet in mid-2007, if all goes according to plan, packets of high-energy protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the 27 km tunnel, attaining velocities within a whisker of the speed of light, and then be deliberately smashed into each other at four separate locations.
Resembling the chapels in a cathedral, those four locations hold detection experiments. Fitting in with the religious analogy, two are multi-part detectors specifically designed to spot the ‘God Particle’: an elusive and theorised atomic fragment so called because physicists hope it will finally make clear how the universe works at the most basic level.
The God Particle’s real name is the Higgs boson, named after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs who first proposed its existence. It is believed to be the last missing piece to the puzzle of the so-called Standard Model – the 20 fundamental forces and particles that, in various permutations and combinations, account for everything around us – light, magnetism, gravity and all forms of matter.
The Higgs is what supposedly gives mass to fundamental particles, such as quarks and leptons, which in turn constitute neutrons, protons and electrons, which in turn make up atoms and molecules and eventually this page, you and the entire universe. The hadron of the Large Hadron Collider is the classification for neutrons and protons, from the Greek ‘hadros’ for strong, because they are held together in the nucleus of an atom by the strong nuclear force.
Experiments at the collider are also intended to provide the ultimate test of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2; to yield a long shot at identifying the mysterious dark matter that supposedly permeates the cosmos; to take a stab at recreating the quark-gluon goo or gas that existed for an instant at the Big Bang; and to roll the dice for a peek into extra dimensions of space-time.
Not to mention the real possibility of confirming supersymmetry. Also known as SUSY, supersymmetry is an arcane concept of paired elementary particles that lies at the heart of the theory that all the forces of nature are interconnected – the ‘theory of everything’ pursued by Albert Einstein for the latter third of his life.
“Simply to be a visitor here is tremendously exciting,” says Stuart Tovey, a pioneer in high-energy physics in Australia.
The 66-year-old Tovey is much more than an ordinary visitor at CERN, the campus-like setting close to the France-Switzerland border. Now formally called the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN is better known by the acronym for its former French name of Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire and operated collectively by 20 European countries.
Some know of CERN’s existence either because this is where the World Wide Web was born (so researchers could exchange data quickly) or because The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown fancifully invoked an anti-matter experiment that threatened world peace here in his earlier book, Angels and Demons.
DARK MATTER
Big Bang Discovery: Cold Dark Matter May Not Exist, But Einstein-Based Hot Dark Matter Should
LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., March 14 (AScribe Newswire) -- A four-page article in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, March 11, focused on the extreme pessimism that prevails today among the many dark matter physicists who have been searching for the mysterious Cold Dark Matter of the universe for as long as 15 years, without success.
The article did not mention Silicon Valley's inventor/scientist, Jerome Drexler, who entered the race to identify dark matter in 2002, based upon Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. He has authored books published in 2006 and 2003 and two scientific papers on his Einstein-based "hot" dark matter theory. As encouragingly described in his 2006 book, the theory appears to be compatible with 15 to 25 assorted cosmic phenomena.
This May 2006 book is available now at libraries of 22 prominent universities and astronomical institutes including: Harvard, Harvard-Smithsonian, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Vassar, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh , University of Helsinki, Kyoto University, Universidad de Chile, University of Hamburg, University of Bologna, University of Goettingen, Canterbury University, Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysik, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Astronomical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, University of Groningen, Universidad de Guadalajara, and the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences.
Drexler's recent discovery of a strong linkage between the dark matter of the universe and the nature of the Big Bang, indicates that both the Big Bang and the dark matter it created must have satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but Cold Dark Matter could not have done so.
An understanding of this phenomenon is helped by an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's tutorial on the subjects of disorder, entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the arrow of time: "It is a matter of common experience, that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe, always increases with time."
Astro-cosmology researcher/author Jerome Drexler says, "Since the Big Bang created only 17 percent ordinary matter compared to 83 percent dark matter, the nature of dark matter and the nature of the Big Bang must be strongly linked."
"In dispersing enormous amounts of energy, protons, and helium nuclei (in a ratio of 12 to 1) throughout the universe, at the beginning of time, the Big Bang had to be orderly (having low entropy) in order to satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
"The Big Bang was able to accomplish this task by dispersing dark matter in the form of ultra-high-energy relativistic protons, which have the very low disorder (low entropy) required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the beginning of time."
"The principal competing dark matter theory is known as the Cold Dark Matter(CDM) theory of slowly moving, uncharged, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Such slowly moving particles would have low kinetic energy and a large percentage of disorder through random motion and therefore a high entropy. Thus, the type of Big Bang that might have created these high entropy WIMPs probably would have exhibited a high entropy itself, making this type of Big Bang unlikely since it could not satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the beginning of time."
Drexler's new five-page scientific paper, published and available on the Internet, posits that the Big Bang was not a fiery, chaotic, disordered explosion but an orderly ultra-high velocity dispersion of relativistic protons and helium nuclei in a ratio of 12 to 1.
The paper explains that the dispersed relativistic protons and helium nuclei became the mysterious dark matter that now represents about 83 percent of the mass of the universe.
The paper also explains that a relativistic-proton Big Bang would be a very efficient way of creating a universe and conserving its energy because the fewest number of particles having the least amount of unusable energy would be created and dispersed On the other hand, a Big Bang creating Cold Dark Matter WIMPs, representing 83 percent of the mass of the universe, would be producing matter having low kinetic energy and high entropy, which would represent a very inefficient Big Bang design concept and a low- energy future for the universe.
The above scientific paper, posted on the Cornell University Library arXiv.org physics website, is entitled, "A Relativistic-Proton Dark Matter Would Be Evidence the Big Bang Probably Satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics." It is dated Feb.15 and is available to the public free of charge at: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0702132 .
Drexler has developed analytical methods to maximize the amount of knowledge derivable from astronomical data. In his 2006 book, he used a substantial amount of astronomical data, his dark matter cosmology, and his new analytical methods to derive plausible explanations for at least 15 and up to as many as 25 mysteries of the cosmos.
The title of Drexler's 2003 book is, "How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy and the Sun: An Astrophysics Detective story. " His 2006 book is, "Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos: Discovering Solutions to Over a Dozen Cosmic Mysteries by Utilizing Dark Matter Relationism, Cosmology, and Astrophysics". His two scientific papers on dark matter can be found on the physics arXiv as physics/0702132 and astro-ph/0504512.
Jerome Drexler is a former NJIT Research Professor in physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology, founder, former Chairman and chief scientist of LaserCard Corp. (Nasdaq: LCRD), and former Member of the Technical Staff of Bell Laboratories. He has been granted 76 U.S. patents, honorary Doctor of Science degrees from NJIT and Upsala (Uppsala) College, a degree of Honorary Fellow of the Technion, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship at Stanford University, a three year Bell Labs graduate study fellowship, and the "Inventor of the Year Award" in 1990 for Silicon Valley.
God particle
Isn't that in the Bible!
The Apocolyptic issues!
Due to these issues the project should have been dumped, it could have lead us to our own ending and new beginning of being a different particle ourselves!
The Apocolyptic issues!
In our search for How God created the universe, why not just ask him!
Ha!
Ha!
Hear those voices often, do you?
So the religious folks among us say "just ask God" for the answers. And hasn't that been the problem all along? Man's progression from superstitious cave dweller to scientific explorer has been a long, tedious road often times inhibited by many people's seemingly willing desire to return to the cave and look to prehistoric superstition for answers. No, like it or not, this is a journey that humanity must accomplish on it's own. This is our purpose; to discover and understand the universe we live in, NOT to regress to the cave and expect some magical being to give us the "answers". Sorry.
hunt for the god particle by Peter Calamai
If the LHC discovers nothing, not even the Higgs particle,
please look at Physics Letters B 636(2006), 56-59; B638(2006) 234-238,
and build the ILC.
sincerely, J.J. van der Bij
ATOM-SMASHER?
7 weeks from now we will all see what this thing can do
we have like 8 billionth of a chance of the world ending
for all we kno it culd be doomsday for earth in just 7 WEEKS!!
i dont disagree with these scientists but i really think its not worth risking over 4.5 billions lifes if a dark hole does appear during this process im sure these smart scientists will figure something out
to save our world and yes it is pretty stupid making this machine to
risk EVERYTHING im just verry worried about this experiment seeing as all
i hear is that the world is going to end and the world is all over
so i just have to say
CERN dont &^%$ up!!!! ur risking the world. This world is everything
It's common to fear these
It's common to fear these steps forward. People worried the first atom bomb might start a chain reaction that destroyed the world. Modern producers worried gene altered crops would take over ordinary crops and destroy all natural farm products. Early horse advocates warned riding a train at 20mph would asphyxiate passengers. Relax. We have a better chance of a ruinous meteor than CERN making a globe collapsing black hole.
playing God
When are these bastard scientists going to leave well enough alone,so many learned fools out there who proclaim to be a genius just because of thier own warped egos,like einstien,the mongrel that gave us the atomic age,far as I am concerned all those involved in this project of making the big bang should be put up against the wall and shot,no trial,no judge,personally I hope you all blow yourself to kingdom come.