Scientists hope the world's most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, will unlock the secrets of the elusive 'God Particle' when switched on later this year.
Credit: CERN
PARIS: The boundaries of knowledge in particle physics look set to be broken soon with scientists around the globe locked in a multi-billion-dollar race to solve two great mysteries.
Their quest: find the secrets of dark matter and the 'God particle' - a sub-atomic particle that is fundamental to understanding the nature of matter, but so elusive that, physicists quip, it can only be compared to divinity.
Last week, an international consortium stepped up the pace by announcing in Beijing, China, a design for the world's most expensive atom smasher - the US$6.7 billion (AU$8.6 billion) International Linear Collider (ILC).
In a double tunnel 31 kilometres long, particle physicists would collide electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, at energies of 500 billion electron volts.
The scheme - which could be extended to 50 kilometres and a trillion electron volts - will hurl these particles at close to the speed of light.
The resultant collision could unlock dark matter and dark energy, the invisible, enigmatic substances that together are thought to comprise 96 per cent of the mass of the universe.
Engineering studies for the ILC will start later this year with the idea of making a decision in 2010 on whether to press ahead with building the machine. If all goes well, ground will be broken in 2012 and the collider itself will be fired up at the end of the next decade.
"The ILC probably represents the maximum that can be achieved with this type of technology," said Guy Wormser, head of France's Linear Accelerator Laboratory, who took part in the Beijing meeting.
Scientists in the U.S. and Europe, meanwhile, are grappling to be first to detect the most eagerly-sought particle in physics - the Higgs Boson. Construed in the 1960s by a British physicist, Peter Higgs, the Boson is thought to exist in an all-pervading field, giving all other particles their mass.
If the Higgs exists, it would fill a worrying gap in the Standard Model, the century-old notional structure for describing the fundamental nature of matter. But if the Higgs doesn't exist, it will be back to the drawing board.
The Europeans are months away from switching on the world's most powerful smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is being built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, using a 26-kilometre underground ring.
The LHC will whizz protons, which are far heavier particles than electrons, to energies of up to 14 trillion electron volts.
Until a few months ago, it seemed that the prize of the Higgs would almost certainly go to the LHC. It alone had the power to explore the theorised particle's mass, which was deemed to be a maximum of 166 giga-electron volts (GeV).
But researchers at the Tevatron collider, at the famous Fermilab facility near Chicago in the U.S., believe they could be in with a chance. New calculations suggest that the upper limit for the Higgs is 153 GeV, which is within the Tevatron's range.
Meanwhile, physicists at Stanford University in California said they have conducted an experiment that proves the viability of a low-cost collider technology called a plasma accelerator.
Instead of using a giant magnet and a huge tunnel to accelerate the particles, their accelerator uses a tunnel just three kilometres long to speed up a beam of electrons.
By passing the electrons through a cloud of ionised gas, or plasma, that is just one metre across, the team were able to double the particle's energy - a massive booster effect, they report in the British journal Nature.
Only a tiny fraction of the electrons in the beam were accelerated this way, though, and the beam itself is not 'concentrated' enough to get a good yield of particle collisions.
According to Wormser, "Plasma accelerators are a promising technology and may be the solution for the future, but on a timescale of 20 to 25 years at least."
Minimal Risk
CERNs web site states that we have not been destroyed by effects of cosmic rays and micro black holes will evaporate.
However, cosmic rays travel too fast to be captured by Earths gravity, and Hawking Radiation is disputed and contradicts Einsteins highly successful relativity theory. Collider particles smash head on like a car collision and can be captured by Earths gravity, and relativity predicts micro black holes will not decay (Hawking called Einstein doubly wrong, yet it is Einstein who is repeatedly found to have been correct in his theories). There is currently no reasonable proof of LHC safety, LSAG (LHC Safety Assessment Group) has been trying for months to prove safety without success. I hold the minority opinion that it may not be possible because it may in fact not be safe.
Cosmic Rays from the legal complaint.
any such novel particle created in nature by cosmic ray impacts would be left with a velocity at nearly the speed of light, relative to earth. At such speeds, . . . , is believed by most theorists to simply pass harmlessly through our planet with nary an impact, safely exiting on the other side. . . . Conversely, any such novel particle that might be created at the LHC would be at slow speed relative to earth, a goodly percentage would then be captured by earths gravity, and could possibly grow larger [accrete matter] with disastrous consequences of the earth turning into a large black hole.
If this thing is so safe, why arent CERN scientists allowed to express any personal fears they might have about this Collider?
Alleged in the legal action: Chief Scientific Officer, Mr. Engelen passed an internal memorandum to workers at CERN, asking them, regardless of personal opinion, to affirm in all interviews that there were no risks involved in the experiments, changing the previous assertion of minimal risk.
(Statisticians generally consider minimal risk as 1-10%).
JTankers
LHCConcerns.com
Dark Matter and the Higgs Boson
So far nobody seems to be asking "Is Dark Matter and the Higgs Boson the same thing?" because judging by this article, their descriptions are very similar.
It does seem dodgey in a
It does seem dodgey in a way. God is usually associated with extreme light. The light is life-giving, warmth, helps you to see and so on. Dark seems very much the opposite. I mean, black holes swallow things up, darkness is associated with fear, blindness. The dark lord and so on.
Maybe the so called "god particle" could be called the devils "particle". Dark matter may just be the opposite of light, in more ways than one.
Ok, I am not really religious, but doing something on this scale of which things like black holes are seemingly linked and not actually knowing what the result will actually be makes me feel like my life is being put down on some wager in the comsic casino. Not really happy being someones chips. To make it worse, it seems that they are putting it ALL on black.
Dark Matter Thought Experiment
A Dark Matter thought experiment.
1) Dark Matter was invented to augment the observed motion of
real visible matter, right? right!
2) Dark Matter interacts with real matter via gravitational forces
only, right? right!
3) Dark Matter too interacts with Dark Matter gravitationally
right? right!
4) Therefore Dark Matter must take part in the orbital dynamics
of the system, right? right!
5) The only difference is that Dark Matter cannot be seen, other
wise, it takes part in the gravitational dynamics of the system,
which is purely Newtonian motion, right? right!
Now that we agree, let us do a pure thought experiment.
Let us do an N-Body simulation, where N will be in the billions.
6) All N Bodies will therefore do a Newtonian Samba. Each of the
N Bodies will clearly have rotational motion velocities defined
by Newton’s laws. Only Newton’s Law accounts for their motions.
7) Now we will use some magic, we will make 90% of the N bodies
invisible, and call them Dark Matter!
8) What do you think would happen to the 10% that are still visible?
9) You guessed! they will keep moving as before and still obey
Newtonian Law’s with no velocity discrepancies.
10 )Moral of the story is, Dark Matter don’t matter.
11) There must be another way! I have a hypothesis for new
alternative to Dark Matter.
/Tissa Perera
Wow, you are a ass. Right?
Wow, you are a ass. Right? Right!
The Wow syndrome
Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." - Elanore Roosevelt
You have no mind as your grey matter has been
taken over by dark matter.
Grow up
Read the title.
expectations
I want hoverboards. There better be some damn hoverboards getting made with this research or everyone at CERN gets a punch in the face.
Wow
They need to increase the complexity of the math question that gets asked before one can post comments. Seems like the Idiot Brigade has descended here.
Higgs boson
Just wanted some confirmation from some intelligent person as to wether the higgs boson is the same Graviton particle scientists have been looking for to add weight to the String Theory. Strico