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BEFORE ANY OF THESE GRAND PUZZLES can be tackled comes the task of breaking in the Large Hadron Collider. That's the first order of business once the slender packets of protons start zooming around the accelerator's octagonal tunnel; they will be coaxed along by 1,700 magnets chilled with liquid helium to two degrees above absolute zero so they are superconducting.
The shakedown will likely still have another full year to run on 21 October 2008, the LHC's official inauguration date. In attendance will be some of the politicians who approved the funding for the collider, a figure that lies somewhere between US$4 billion, counting only cash outlay, to $8 billion, including contributions in kind and personnel. For that kind of money, the politicians have been told they're getting two beams of protons each carrying 7 TeV that will produce a 14 TeV smash-up.
That's not the complete story. The sought-after new particles are produced not by the collisions of the protons themselves, but by collisions between the quarks and the gluons from inside the protons. These carry only a fraction of the energy of their parent protons, so a quark–quark smash won't release much more than 2 TeV, energy which is then divvied up among all the collision debris.
During this commissioning phase, engineers and scientists from 80 countries have to become adept in fine-tuning those proton beams, slowly nudging the apparatus up to 'full luminosity'. They also need to be experts in the challenging vagaries of the four underground detectors.
Two of these, ATLAS and CMS, are complex general purpose apparati for which initial target will be the Higgs. The third, LHCb, is tackling the mysterious absence of antimatter in the universe by looking at bottom-flavoured quarks and antiquarks. The fourth, ALICE, probes collisions of lead ions which will produce a substance called a quark-gluon plasma that's assumed to be similar to the Big Bang's primordial fireball.
Taking extra care to understand precisely what these detectors are detecting (and not detecting) is crucial because discoveries at the LHC won't feature a filmic 'Eureka' moment with a white-coated researcher pointing excitedly to a telltale particle track on a computer screen. In the past, impatience and rivalry have led to premature claims of discovery at CERN, an embarrassment chronicled in the 1986 book Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes.
To guard against any such slips, research groups usually have a member who plays the role of advocatus diaboli (Devil's advocate), somewhat like the Vatican-appointed sceptics who picked holes in the evidence of miracles attributed to candidates for sainthood. As the overall detector quality co-ordinator on ATLAS, Rob McPherson acknowledges the importance of such scepticism.
"I've done rare-particle searches for my whole career," says McPherson, who was based at CERN for 10 years and is now a research scientist with Canada's Institute of Particle Physics, a virtual body. "I've never done an analysis in my life where I haven't discovered something. But it didn't always work out to be quite true."
Also providing further insurance against mistakes are the large collaborations at the LHC. About 1,700 investigators are associated with ATLAS, for example, so any results will be double-checked "from Istanbul to Kentucky," in the words of one physicist.
Funding cutbacks have also rocked other big international science projects such as the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and ITER, the experimental nuclear fusion reactor being built in the south of France (see "Nuclear 2.0", Cosmos 19, p50). One person troubled by these trends is physicist Lawrence Krauss, who ran a session on international collaborations at the AAAS meeting in Boston.
"LHC may be our last hope to find answers," says Krauss, also a best-selling popular science author from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "It may be the last accelerator ever built." If so, the Large Hadron Collider will have inspired a new generation of particle physicists and then abandoned them, with no way of crossing over the next energy threshold.
Typical of these is 33-year-old Brigitte Vachon, who worked on the DZero experiment at Fermilab before being lured home to Canada with an appointment as a Canada Research Chair in particle physics at McGill University in Montréal. Interviewed during one of her periodic forays to work on the ATLAS detector at the LHC, Vachon radiates enthusiasm across the transoceanic phone link.
"It's a fascinating project from every aspect, even if you don't care about the physics – the engineering challenge, the computing challenge and the social challenge of working with thousands of people from scores of countries.
"We'll be turning on a great big toy and seeing how it works."
Peter Calamai is the national science reporter for Canada's Toronto Star and is a graduate in physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
Safety Rebuttal
Excellent quality article.
The dice with 3 sixes is a bit ominous. Some of us are hoping CERN does not roll 3 sixes when high energy collisions begin.
A number of PHD level theoretical scientists also have questions about LHC Safety.
The most notable is Professor Dr. Otto E. Rossler, most famous for his contributions to Chaos theory.
Dr. Rossler refutes CERN's safety arguments and proposes that if micro black holes are created (some say the odds are 1 in 1000, others say the odds are 1 in 2) they would grow large enough to threaten Earth in 50 months to 50 years.
Got LHCFacts?
Cosmic Roulette
Intersting article, and very well written. However it would be nice to proffer the objections to the project, as one commentator has suggested. There are two sides to every story. Howabout examining what happens if things go wrong?
A bit of "doomsday" in the article would be enjoyable for the cynics. Moreover, suppose that the negative scenario does happen, are there any procedures in place to rectify them? I mean, flipping the on-off switch isn't exactly going to make a black hole go away, if one is created.
cosmic roulette
The earth is already bombarded with cosmic rays many thousands of times more energetic than the beams at CERN. If high energy collisions were dangerous, catastrophe would have happened already.
LHC - another white elephant
The whole dark matter concept is a patch up band-aide to save big bang from the dustbin of scientific history. It is futile. Einstein’s field equations for the static vacuum gravitational field, i.e. Ric = 0,violates his ‘Principle of Equivalence’ – the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and the laws of Special Relativity, cannot manifest in a spacetime which is by definition empty, that contains no matter. QED. Consequently, if his energy-momentum tensor is zero there is no Einstein gravitational field. Hence his field equations take the following form:
Gij/k + Tij = 0, (subscripts)i,j = 0,1,2,3, k = constant,
wherein the Gij/k are the components of a gravitational energy tensor. Thus the total energy of the gravitational field is always zero; the Gij/k and Tij must vanish identically; there is no possibility for the localisation of gravitational energy (i.e. there is no possibility for Einstein’s gravitational waves). Moreover, this means that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity violates the experimentally well established conservation of energy and momentum, so if the usual conservation of energy and momentum is valid (bearing in mind that there is no experimental evidence to refute it) then Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is invalid. Also, Einstein invented his pseudo-tensor by which he and subsequent big bangers and LIGOers and LHCers claim that his gravitational energy can be localized. However, Einstein’s pseudo-tensor is a meaningless concoction of mathematical symbols for the following reason – it implies the existence of a 1st-order intrinsic differential invariant which depends only upon the components of the metric tensor and their 1st-derivatives (to see this just contract his pseudo-tensor and apply Euler’s theorem). But the pure mathematicians G. Ricci-Curbastro and T. Levi-Civita proved in 1900 that such invariants do not exist! In addition, Einstein and the subsequent big bangers and LIGOers and LHCers resort to linearisation of Einstein’s field equations to localize his gravitational energy. This too is nonsense, because linearisation implies the existence of a tensor which, except for the particular case of being precisely zero, does not otherwise exist, as proven by H. Weyl in 1944. So the big bangers and the LIGOers and their international counterparts such as the AIGO in Australia and VIRGO in Europe, are all destined to detect nothing.
As for black hole collisions, mergers and binaries producing gravitational waves, that too is nonsense by the foregoing. To amplify, let’s assume for the sake of argument that black holes are predicted by General Relativity. The simplest black hole is the so-called “Schwarzschild black hole”, obtained from Ric = 0, which is a statement that there is no matter in the Universe. Since the ‘Principle of Superposition’ does not apply in Einstein’s theory, owing to it being non-linear, one cannot, by an analogy with Newton’s theory (where the Principle of Superposition holds), just arbitrarily insert lumps of matter into any given spacetime for his gravitational field. Now according to the black holers and gravitational wavers , two “Schwarzschild” black holes (concocted by stupidly applying the ‘Principle of Superposition’ of Newton’s theory), each obtained separately from Ric = 0 (an empty spacetime), can mutually interact in a mutual spacetime that by definition contains no matter! That is nonsense, but the simplicity of it escapes their poor brains. Furthermore, before one can talk of black hole interactions it must first be proved that the two-body problem is well-defined within General Relativity. This can be done in only two ways, (a) derivation of an exact solution to the field equations for two bodies, or (b) proof of an existence theorem by which it can be shown that Einstein’s field equations contain latent solutions for such a configuration of matter. There are no known solutions to the field equations for the interaction of two or more bodies, so option (a) has never been fulfilled, and no existence theorem has ever been proven, so option (b) has never been fulfilled either. Moreover, General Relativity has not been able to account for the simple experimental fact that two fixed bodies will approach one another upon release. So all talk of black holes interacting is nonsense. However the whole issue is moot, since black holes are in fact forbidden by the Theory of Relativity (it forbids infinite densities), and owing to the violation of the usual conservation of energy and momentum, General Relativity is invalid, and with it the alleged big bang. The LHCers various claims for bangs and holes are just plain poppycock. Finally, despite the claims that black holes have been "discovered" all over the place, nobody has ever found one because the signatures of the alleged black hole, (a) an infinitely dense point-mass singularity and (b) an event horizon, have never been found. Claims for their discover is wishful thinking, not science. The LHC is just like LIGO et al, a massive gravy train for its participants, at the great expense of the taxpayer.
More non-mathematical details are here:
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Unicorns.html
For those who want the mathematical proofs, go here:
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2008/PP-12-11.PDF
And here: http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-09-14.PDF