Looking for God

[Pakage]

sorry, its kind of a long read, but its really interesting! especially if you've read the book 'Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown.

 

 

Physicist David Evans has an unusual take on the US$6 billion underground particle accelerator he is helping to complete on the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.

 

"If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history," says the Birmingham University researcher. "If it doesn't, we will have assembled the world's most expensive piece of modern art."

 

These sentiments suggest a certain nervousness among Europe's scientific elite as their great project reaches fruition - although most researchers say they are confident of success. They insist that when Europe's large hadron collider (LHC) is switched on in November, it will hum into life as expected.

 

Beams of protons, one of the core constituents of an atom's nucleus, will be hurtled at colossal velocities around the machine's 27km circular tunnel and made to smash into each other. Subterranean vaults of electronic detectors will track the sub-atomic rubble erupting from these collisions.

 

Huge refrigerators, filled with liquid helium, will cool key parts of the collider to -270C, colder than outer space, and above ground, a bank of 5000 computers will analyse the detectors' vast output - equivalent to a DVD's worth of electronic data every second - and help physicists uncover the secrets of the universe's structure.

 

This is science on a gargantuan scale - a device the size of London Underground's Circle Line, engineered to one-billionth of a metre accuracy, which will probe the universe's tiniest constituents and study the Big Bang birth of the cosmos 13 billion years ago.

 

To this end, thousands of physicists and engineers have laboured for 10 years to set up the most expensive, most complicated scientific experiment ever attempted.

 

Clearly, a lot is expected of this machine, so perhaps it is not surprising that there is an air of concern in the corridors and offices of the LHC's home at Cern, Europe's particle physics laboratory. But these worries are focused less on possible failure, and more on the issue of timing. Physicists know it will take months to tune their hadron collider - hadrons are a class of particle that includes the proton - to a perfect pitch so it churns out the data that they need to find new particles.

 

And that gap could be awkward, for delays might let a bunch of upstart Americans, using an older and less powerful device, beat Europe to the draw.

 

Scientists at the Fermilab laboratory in Illinois have been hinting that their ageing accelerator, the Tevatron, may be on the threshold of uncovering the Holy Grail of modern physics, the Higgs boson, or "the God particle", as it is sometimes known.

 

The existence of the Higgs boson was proposed by the Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 to explain why objects - including people - in our universe have mass. The Higgs interacts with other particles, thus making them heavy, by clinging to them like treacle, he suggested. The idea caught on and has become the cornerstone of modern physics. But no matter how hard scientists have tried, they have failed to get a single glimpse of a Higgs. Such an omission is embarrassing, and scientists badly want to put it right.

 

Proof of the particle's existence would, if nothing else, confirm that their theories about the universe are broadly right.

 

"It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," admits Jos Engelen, Cern's chief scientist.

 

Getting close to God and finding the Higgs was a prime reason for constructing the LHC.

 

Its tunnels, super-conducting magnets, experiment halls and banks of computers have been put together with this very much in mind. For almost 10 years, Cern has concentrated on this project, at the expense of virtually all other research.

 

But now, at the last minute, the Americans are threatening to steal Europe's thunder - though European scientists' view is that if the Americans want a battle, they can have one.

 

"We have spent most of the past decade building this machine," says Professor Jim Virdee, of Imperial College London. "Now we are almost there. There is a real buzz about the place. The race is on."

 

Cern's view is that even if it loses out in the race to the Higgs, its great machine will go on to make discoveries of even greater importance.

 

These include the prospect of finding extra dimensions in space and uncovering particles that could account for "dark matter", which is believed to permeate the universe and account for most of its mass.

 

But discovering the Higgs has acquired immense symbolic importance for Cern.

 

How do you find one? Not easily, is the answer. You have to recreate the conditions of the first moments of the universe's explosive birth, when the cosmos seethed with strange, exotic, highly energetic particles. Do that, and Higgs particles will start to pop into existence, scientists predict.

 

The only issue is the tricky business of reproducing the early universe. That task requires the construction of a device of extraordinary proportions, the large hadron collider.

 

It will soak up 10 times more energy than any other particle accelerator on Earth to accelerate bunches of protons, kept in two beams, each less than a hair's-breadth in diameter, to "within a gnat's whisker of the speed of light", according to Steve Myers, head of Cern's beam mechanisms.

 

One beam will circulate clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. Then, at four points along the collider's tunnel, the beams will cross over. Bunches of protons - each containing 100 billion particles - will slam into other oncoming bunches, triggering collisions that will fling barrages of sub-atomic detritus in all directions.

 

These explosive interactions will form the core of the great collider's operations, and will generate new types of particle, including the Higgs, that will pop fleetingly into existence before disintegrating into a trail of other sub-atomic entities.

 

The crucial point is that the greater the energy generated by a collider, the bigger the particles it can create. Matter and energy are interchangeable, so if you release vast amounts of energy you will create new, very large particles in your beam collisions.

 

And most predictions suggest the Higgs is relatively big, hence scientists' past failure to produce them - their machines have not been powerful enough. The LHC should put that right.

 

Making God particles is one thing, of course. Spotting them and confirming their existence is another. To do that, four great experiment halls have been constructed round the collider's collision points and into these vaults, 90m below ground.

 

Scientists and engineers have fitted thousands of tonnes of detectors and magnets to track the pathways of escaping particles.

 

These chambers are vast, and the instruments inside are breathtakingly complex - arrays of detectors and magnets are piled up around each other like layers of a great metallic onion.

 

Particles created by proton collisions will whizz out through these layers, decay into other particles while in flight, and leave telltale signs of their passage.

 

Billions of interactions will take place every second, though the vast majority will be automatically rejected by the collider's computers, which will be programmed to recognise only interesting, unusual particle flight patterns.

 

Theorists predict the collider will be lucky to make more than one or two Higgs particles a day.

 

"The problem is that we will need to create several hundred and study their behaviour before we can be sure we have the Higgs," says Jim Virdee.

 

It will therefore take several months, with the LHC working flat out, before European physicists can be sure they have got their baby. Most expect that success will come late next year.

 

The Americans have already been battering beams of particles together to try to create the Higgs. But the US machine strains to reach the colossal energies needed for such a task, and despite hints, US scientists have yet to produce the goods.

 

"You never know, they might just do it - but I doubt it," says Virdee. "They will need a lot of luck to beat us."

 

The Higgs is just the start. Many other strange new particles will emerge from its proton collisions and help solve a host of other scientific puzzles.

 

Consider dark matter. Physicists and astronomers have shown that the particles which make up stars, planets and humans account for only a tiny fraction of the universe's mass. Something else is out there, an invisible form of matter that is generating gravitational ripples throughout the cosmos.

 

Sub-atomic entities called super-symmetrical particles are a favourite candidate, and researchers believe there is a strong chance the large hadron collider will produce them. It is even possible that these particles will reveal the existence of at least another six new dimensions of space - a fairly boggling prospect.

 

But Cern is a mind-boggling place, a town of 2500 permanent staff and a constant influx of around 7500 visiting experts, each dedicated to uncovering the universe's mysteries.

 

Apart from the Nobel prizes that have been won here, Cern has also generated some of the planet's slickest engineering work. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991 while working at Cern. Other spin-offs include the development of brain scanners and the use of isotopes in medical research.

 

You can get a real feel for the talent, creativity and eccentricity of the place in its large, ramshackle, neon-lit cafeteria which, day and night, is filled with shifts of technicians, secretaries, researchers, theoreticians and policy-makers.

 

Perched on plywood seats at long Formica tables, earnest young researchers swig beer and argue over the minutiae of particle physics. As the LHC reaches readiness, the air of expectation is palpable.

 

"In a way we are in a perfect situation," says Dr Jo Cole of Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a leading worker in the CMS experiment hall.

 

"Either we prove the theoreticians are right and help in the garnering of Nobel prizes. Or we will show they were wrong. We will have found something else that is new and exciting, and will have overturned accepted science."

 

The intriguing point is that most Cern scientists, if given the choice, would probably plump for the "wrong" scenario. Yes, it would be great to beat the Americans to the Higgs, but it would be even better if Cern found that Higgs did not exist at all, or that it came with a whole new class of sister particles that had never been predicted by theorists. Far better to rock the boat than have it continue to sail on calm waters.

 

"It is uncertainty that we really relish," says physicist Evans. "We don't like things that are all neatly sewn up.'

 

And that is a crucial point. People may think scientists are control freaks who want the universe in safe compartments. But constant revolution is what they really desire.

 

And never before have scientists been better equipped to bring about that revolution. They have built the world's biggest machine committed to uncovering the universe's smallest fragments, which, in reality, is a vast device dedicated to seeking out uncertainty and undermining scientific convictions.

 

Even if the Higgs turns up more or less on cue, it won't take the LHC much longer to start producing all sorts of strange results that will perplex and confuse the theorists. That is its real purpose.

 

Says Evans: "I will happily bet a month's salary, which admittedly is not very much, that we will have thrown up whole new fields of physics within two years of switching on the LHC."

[Reform]

Yep, read 'Angels and Demon's' just as good, if not better than 'The Da Vinci Code'.. I heard about this particle collider being built a couple of years back and my reaction is the same every time I hear about it... "fuck I hope these fools don't accidently create some kind of hyper fission and blow us all up!"

[Guest]

did i read about this in the newspaper recently??

 

p.s ....god backwards is dog.....

[Known One]

yea, This experiment has been really high profile...

 

You may have read about the possibility that they may create a Black Hole and wipe out the solar system, and subsequently deciding that the risk was small enough to proceed (People thought that the Atom Bomb would ignite the atmosphere back in the day)

 

 

The other experiment to keep an ear out for is Hot Fusion, similar to existing Nuclear Power Technology except using complete Fission of Hydrogen into Helium. No Nuclear Waste and abundant fuel (Hydrogen) could mean the end to the quest for a renewable energy source. There's an experimental reactor being built at the moment which should kick off soonish, next step is to build a Power Plant.

Edited May 30, 2007 by Guest

[mike]

You may have read about the possibility that they may create a Black Hole and wipe out the solar system, and subsequently deciding that the risk was small enough to proceed

 

Nice of them to decide to take that risk on behalf of a few billions people, based on untested technology and theories

[Pakage]

You may have read about the possibility that they may create a Black Hole and wipe out the solar system, and subsequently deciding that the risk was small enough to proceed

 

Nice of them to decide to take that risk on behalf of a few billions people, based on untested technology and theories

no guts no glory right?

 

i say go for it!

 

apocalypse shmashmocolypse