CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang

[Fansome]

September 7, 2008
CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:53 p.m. ET

GENEVA (AP) -- It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe -- or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro ''black holes'' and endanger the planet.

The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project's price tag of nearly $4 billion.

''This only happens once a generation,'' said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. ''People are certainly very excited.''

The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages.

The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border.

Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel.

CERN dismisses the risk of micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project. They unsuccessfully mounted a similar action in 1999 to block the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.

CERN's collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN.

Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons -- previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom -- were made of still smaller quarks and gluons.

CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about ''dark matter,'' antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.

Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman's terms.

The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel -- the ALICE, or ''A Large Ion Collider Experiment'' -- produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang.

''We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other,'' Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN.

''This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma.''

The soup cools quickly and the quarks and gluons stick together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.

That will enable scientists to look for still missing pieces to the puzzle -- or lead to the formulation of a new theory on the makeup of matter.

Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has produced the Large Hadron Rap, a video clip that has attracted more than a million views on YouTube.

''The things that it discovers will rock you in the head,'' McAlpine raps as she dances in the tunnel and caverns.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the lyrics are ''absolutely scientifically spot on.''

''It's quite brilliant,'' Gillies said.

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On the Net:

CERN: http://www.cern.ch

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: http://www.fnal.gov

The U.S. at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/

Large Hadron Rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vf6aU-wFSqt0

[cmradio]

But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project.

Many kooks would just as soon see us go back to horse and buggies

Thank you for the info Fansome.

Peace!

[Fansome]

September 9, 2008
Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Failing a collision with an unforeseen asteroid or an invasion from Alpha Centauri, the world will probably not end on Wednesday, but a lot of people will be holding their breath anyway.

At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.

And a generation of physicists, watching from control rooms and auditoriums on the scene, on Webcasts at webcast.cern or on Eurovision will meet their destiny. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, outside Chicago, will hold a “pajama party” for staff members and journalists to watch the events live from a remote control room.

The collider, 14 years and $8 billion in the making, is the most expensive scientific experiment to date. Thousands of physicists from dozens of countries have been involved in building the collider and its huge particle detectors. It is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts — seven times the energy of the next largest machine in the world, Fermilab’s Tevatron — and smash them together.

In recent weeks, there has been a blitzkrieg of papers and predictions on what might or might not be discovered, by theorists eager to get their bets down before the figurative roulette ball drops or the dice begin to tumble.

At stake is a suite of theories called the Standard Model, which explains all of particle physics to date, but which breaks down at the conditions that existed in the earliest moments of the universe. The new collider will eventually reach temperatures and energies equivalent to those at a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. There are many theories about what will happen, including the emergence of a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is hypothesized to endow other particles with mass, or the identity of the mysterious dark matter that provides the invisible scaffolding of galaxies and the cosmos.

But nobody really knows for sure, which is part of the fun, but which has led to a few alarming claims that the collider could spit out a black hole or some other accidental phenomenon that could end the Earth or the universe. Those claims have been vigorously rebutted by a series of safety reports and studies, the most recent of which was published last week in The Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, a peer-reviewed journal.

The director general of CERN, Robert Aymar, said in a news release, “The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

Even if its critics are right, the end is not nigh. For now, the beams will only be circulating, not colliding, in what is more of what Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua called a “mediatic” event on his blog, dorigo.wordpress.com. The intensity of the beams, he wrote, “will be more or less like that of vehicles on a dust trail in Arizona, and our detectors will be like poor souls dozing on the side, thumb up for a hitchhike in case a car stops.”

The first collisions, at a non-Earth-shattering energy of 450 billion electron volts apiece, will not happen for another couple of weeks or so. And it might take a month or two to ramp up the proton energies to five trillion electron volts — as high as the machine will go before shutting down for the winter — and collide them.

The whole world will be watching. Information on how to join them is here: lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch.

[Fansome]

September 10, 2008
CERN Launches World’s Largest Particle Collider
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:33 a.m. ET

GENEVA (AP) -- The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

There it is,'' project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

The startup was eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

''Well done everybody,'' said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 a.m. (0732 GMT).

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, fired the protons -- a type of subatomic particle -- around the tunnel in stages, several kilometers (miles) at a time.

Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.

The startup -- eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here -- comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

''It's nonsense,'' said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.

CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

And full power is probably a year away.

''On Wednesday we start small,'' said Gillies. ''A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you've got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show-stopper.''

The LHC, as the collider is known, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country which contributed $531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about ''dark matter,'' antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle -- the Higgs boson -- believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

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On the Net:

CERN: http://www.cern.ch

The U.S. at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/

Large Hadron Rap http://www.youtube.com/watch?vf6aU-wFSqt0

[Pigmeat]

Where am I?

[corq]

There's really nothing to fear, the webcams are installed, you can monitor the safety of the smasher here:

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html