The worlds largest ever physics experiment – designed to probe the very existence of all the matter in the universe has been successfully started.
The switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Cern laboratory in Geneva is a major step in furthering our understanding of the universe around us. The particle accelerator, built at a cost of £4.4 billion, has been designed to recreate what happened at the birth of the Universe.
They have fired a beam of protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the LHC. The beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. “There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. Later adding: “We had a very good start-up.”
The day has gone much smoother than experts predicted. Professor Brian Cox said: “The beam circulated the LHC 3 times on the first attempt at just before 10.28 CET (0928 BST). The senior guys here do look genuinely surprised at the performance of their 27km baby. To put it into context, I was told earlier that the last machine here, LEP, which was much simpler, took 12 hours to get to this point. LHC has delivered the goods in an hour!”
At 10.31 BST the first beam event was witnessed in the ATLAS detector – one of 4 detectors along the 27km-long ring. It is expected that at some point today the opposite beam will be started up – the team at Cern didn’t expect to reach this point so early in the initiation process of the experiment.
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The vast circular tunnel – the "ring" – which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end. The magnets are there to steer the beam – made up of particles called protons – around this 27km-long ring. Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second. At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events. Among the debris thrown off by these collisions, scientists hope they will find the elusive Higgs-Boson, which is thought to be responsible for giving every other particle its mass, or weight. But scientists admit it could be years before they start producing any meaningful results due to the challenges involved in detecting such tiny and fleeting particles. |
Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society said: "Science demands experimentation and some scientific challenges are so great that they demand a massive enterprise, in which thousands of researchers combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.
"This happened in astronomy with the Hubble Telescope, and in biology with the human genome project. And now it is happening in Physics. The Large Hadron Collider, which begins operations today, will be the largest experiment in human history."
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The safety opposition alleges CERN is misrepresenting the certainty of safety and did not properly address compelling safety rebuttal papers by credible senior scientists including visiting professor of Physics Dr. Otto Rössler and Physics PHD Dr. Rainer Plaga.
Dr. Steven Hawking estimates a 1% chance that micro black holes will be created by the Large Hadron Collider, CERN estimated possible micro black hole creation at one per second, micro black hole evaporation and cosmic ray safety arguments are disputed.
Dr. Rössler (of Chaos theory and Endophysics fame) calculates possible danger, senior Physics PHD Dr. Rainer Plaga (wrote one of the reports refuting CERN\’s safety conclusions) calculates possible danger, former Nuclear Safety Officer Walter L. Wagner (cosmic ray researcher and California Math champion) calculates possible danger.
To demand a safety conference before high energy collisions begin contact LHCDefense.org
LHCFacts.org
I have been chasing all the latest news about CERN and LHC.Higgs boson isn’t only illusive but it is non existant. More illusive and yet approachable is graviton. But no one really seems to be going after it.one day it is very likely that both will turn out same. I am an enthusiast about the origin of the universe. CERN seems to be finding out about the same. I have lot of new ideas about the origin of the universe. I can share it with you. But disapointing enough, I am sure there are no higgs bosons, and CERN will not come accross them.