Today was the grand-opening of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The LHC is the world's largest supercollider, located in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is shown from above in the first photo, it is the giant circle on the ground. The second photo is the inside of "ATLAS", one of the particle detectors of the LHC. Look at that guy standing in the middle. This thing is HUGE!
Supercolliders are essentially gigantic race tracks, except instead of cars there are beams of particles that crash into each other. These particles can tell us almost anything about the universe, and supercolliders are the keystone of particle physics. Here is the official CERN press release regarding today's trial run of the LHC. They haven't actually collided any particles yet, today they just shot a beam of protons around in the circle a few times.
The actual collisions have caused a lot of debate and will continue to terrify the uninformed until they are actually tested on October 21st. Some physicists have theorized that the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the Earth, killing us all.
In case the video isn't working on the blog, here is a LINK to the movie on YouTube.
Don't worry, its not going to happen. Here is a CERN article explaining exactly how safe the test really is. The black holes that could possibly be created, as theorized, would either disappear immediately or cause no macroscopic damage while remaining on Earth.
The following video is a TED Talk about the LHC from March, which explains exactly what is so special about this linear accelerator in particular.
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The LHC will be able to detect the Higgs Field, or Higgs Particles, explained very well at time 7:38 in the video. If these particles are discovered, we will be able to use the Standard Model to answer any possible question in the universe. This is a HUGE step for physics, and the world in general.The blue picture shows particles colliding in a linear accelerator. Each of those little lines is the path that a particle flew on upon collision.
Here comes the politics. The LHC was a product of more than two decades of work from over 85 countries all over the world. Our tax dollars have paid for it for years, and it isn't even taking place in our country. I believe that the LHC is perfectly safe, but many people on the web (see the comments of the YouTube video) think that it should not be used. However, we have not actually studied black holes up close. We don't know what's going to happen when the first collision takes place. There is a chance, unbelievably small as it may be, that something horrible could happen. Even if the world doesn't end, it will be changed forever. The possibilities of what can be done once the Higgs Particle is confirmed are endless. The world as we know it will be different by late October. There was no global conference on whether this experiment should proceed or not, we didn't really have a say in the matter at all.
Do you guys think it's fair that such a world-changing event is going to take place without some sort of global discussion? I am glad that the experiment is taking place, but also wonder whether there should have been more democracy involved in this. There is a point where democracy is unreasonable because of the scale of things, and I guess "whole world" is a little bit too large a group to get votes from. What do you guys think?
And for all of you green tree-huggers out there, the LHC uses 1000 gigawatt hours of electricity annually, about 1/3 of the energy PRODUCED in the entire United States. This is a single scientific experiment that is eating up the equivalent of 1/3 of the nation's electricity. What do you say to that?
