But what is LHC and what is the reason behind the human Endeavour to build a machine such as this or monstrosity as it is being called by some.
As put in science daily – “Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction”.
So come, explore with me the conundrum behind arguably perhaps the greatest scientific effort by humankind and I really say human kind and not an individual since this work is being conducted by an international team – making it a truly human Endeavour rather than a work of a single intellectual giant like Einstein, Newton, etc… The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
What is Large Hadron Collider or LHC?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground and is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.
The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.
You can take a photo tour of LHC by clicking here
There is another very good collection of LHC related photographs at the Big Picture.
A graphical display of all components of LHC can be found here.
Complete workings of LHC can be found at CERN Site.
Why is LHC needed?
If we are to believe the scientists – this is all related to unfinished business of Newton and perhaps Einstein as well. Newton told us what the effects of gravitation are and how to calculate the effects. But told nothing about the nature of gravity – what is it after all and what causes it?
Einstein went a step further and combined Space and time. And then went on to explain gravity as the after effect of large mass curving space-time. This is all fine, but it still doesn’t tell us what gives us mass at all?
And it is here that we ask the crucial question - What is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weigh the amount they do? Why do some particles have no mass at all? At present, there are no established answers to these questions. The most likely explanation may be found in the Higgs boson, a key undiscovered particle that is essential for the Standard Model to work. First hypothesized in 1964, it has yet to be observed. The ATLAS and CMS experiments will be actively searching for signs of this elusive particle.
Everything we see in the Universe, from an ant to a galaxy, is made up of ordinary particles. These are collectively referred to as matter, forming 4% of the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the remaining proportion, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.
What does this machine do? Well, in LHC, two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC
When activated, it is theorized that the LHC - collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain, as I mentioned earlier, how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.
The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including super symmetric particles, compositeness (Technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments will look for super symmetric particles to test a likely hypothesis for the make-up of dark matter.
It will also help us in explaining the bias found in nature of matter over anti-matter. More specifically, it will help us in answering as to why there is no anti-matter. We live in a world of matter – everything in the Universe, including ourselves, is made of matter. Antimatter is like a twin version of matter, but with opposite electric charge. At the birth of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang. But when matter and antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other, transforming into energy. Somehow, a tiny fraction of matter must have survived to form the Universe we live in today, with hardly any antimatter left. Why does Nature appear to have this bias for matter over antimatter?
The LHCb experiment will be looking for differences between matter and antimatter to help answer this question. Previous experiments have already observed a tiny behavioral difference, but what has been seen so far is not nearly enough to account for the apparent matter–antimatter imbalance in the Universe.
I’ll be writing more about the Higgs Boson or the “GOD PARTICLE” in my next entry. But if you are interested in reading more about it – follow this link.
It will also help us in answering whether there are other hidden dimensions. We are able to sense the common 3-dimensions and now with the help of Einstein also – time. Einstein showed that the three dimensions of space are related to time. Subsequent theories propose that further hidden dimensions of space may exist; for example, string theory implies that there are additional spatial dimensions yet to be observed. These may become detectable at very high energies, so data from all the detectors will be carefully analyzed to look for signs of extra dimensions.
So what’s the problem?
Okay, it sounds pretty fancy stuff, but hardly the case for paranoia being displayed by some groups of scientists and merrily being covered by our usual sensationalist media :-)
The main problem with the whole project is - Nobody knows for sure what is going to happen (off course there are several theories that are being tested).
Of course there is wide agreement that one of the sub products could be small black holes (tiny, mini, and minuscule). after that, most scientists (by most here I mean almost everyone in the planet) believe that, if these black holes happen to exist, they would “disappear” due to a series of very complicated reasons or, if they stay, it would take them several billion years before they grow to “eat” the earth.
A quite small number of scientists (allegedly 1 or 2 or the groups surrounding them), believes that this black holes would grow and fast, so they would end eating the earth in 50 months and, although the probability is not easily quantified, does the gravity of the potential result deserves to put the experiment on hold until a proper discussion takes places within the scientific community?
The concerns of this group were understood and addressed by CERN and dismissed. CERN actually used the research of Professor Steve Giddings, of UC Santa Barbara. Giddings has co-authored a paper documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe. The paper, co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is building the world's largest particle collider, investigates hypothesized behavior of tiny black holes that might be created by high-energy collisions in the CERN particle accelerator.
As quoted in Science daily - The Giddings/Mangano study concludes that such microscopic black holes would be harmless. In fact, he added, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already, Giddings said.
Two major lawsuits have been initiated and quashed as far as I can understand (remember, I am not a lawyer either). One in the European Court of Human Rights and other in the US Federal District Court in Honolulu. The first sought an emergency injunction based on the experiment violating the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law, and the second tried to force the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. It is important to note that the European Court of Human Rights rejected the request for the injunction but will hear the case (after the experiment has started). The status of US case is unknown at this moment.
Personally, I do not think that LHC is a threat to universe and humanity. Personally, I think it is a great conceit on humanity’s part if we think collectively that building a 27 km long tunnel and smashing a few atoms can trigger a universal collapse back to the state which existed prior to Big Bang. Although I am not a qualified high energy physicist, I do recall a similar scare during the time of the Manhattan Project – or the A-Bomb project of USA during 1940’s. At that time also, nobody was sure of what would happen when an atomic bomb went off. There were wild theories – mostly in public media and imagination and the most fanciful one that I recall is related to whole of earth’s atmosphere being burned off due to chain reaction set off by the exploding bomb.
Of course it never happened that way – our presence here is a testimony to that.
I do, however, acknowledge this hullaballoo as a classic case of failure of science to communicate to the masses. The media is doing what it does usually – sensationalizing the issue beyond reason.
Let’s look forward to a new era in scientific break through and new understandings of our reality as well new technologies. Remember – there wouldn’t TV if not for quantum mechanics, No GPS if not for Einstein and Newton!
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