Large Hadron Collider turned on – the world didn’t end…

So… the LHC or the Large Hadron Collider was completed and turned ON last Wednesday and yet the world didn’t end… of course there is always the funny side to anything monumental. Check out this website which purports to have two live webcams at CERN LHC site…. http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

News that a group of Greek hackers had managed to “momentary” access to computer systems of CERN has been making rounds. As one insider put it – “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it” – I totally sympathize the “poor” scientists – they take years to build a system which is hard enough to get up and running and there are people who want to bring it down – just for the kicks?

The whole idea goes way back. The first key experiment was conducted in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford. When Rutherford shot alpha particles at a wafer-thin sheet of gold foil, a small proportion of the particles bounced right back, a phenomenon that he described as “almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.” Rutherford’s work led to the realization that most of an atom’s mass was concentrated in a tiny area, the nucleus. “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting,” he is supposed to have said.

Since Rutherford’s discovery, particle physics has provided one extraordinary—if increasingly implausible-sounding—revelation after another: first protons and neutrons, then antimatter, gluons, neutrinos, and quarks. In 1967, the existence of particles to mediate the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, was theorized; in 1983, at CERN, these particles—the W and the Z—were observed and their properties measured. In 1977, the existence of what became known as the “top” quark was predicted; in 1995, at Fermilab, in Illinois, it, too, was found.

And yet, for all its triumphs, the field has been haunted by failure. The more physicists have learned about the way matter behaves at its most fundamental level, the more acutely they have become aware that something—a big something—is missing from their accounts. Among the many possibilities proposed for what’s often called “new physics” is that the universe actually consists of tiny strands (or strings) of energy; that it contains several dimensions beyond those that we perceive; that it is full of mysterious particles—“sparticles”—that have yet to be detected; that it is not a universe at all but a multiverse; and that it began not with a bang but with a splat.

LHC is considered the best hope for finding some answers. Sean has a take on what the LHC will find and some percentages of probability to back it up… take a look!

And just in case you are the home enthusiast – here is the site for DO-IT-AT-HOME and contribute your computer’s idle time (which must be really huge since you are reading this stuff :-)) – on a similar note as that of the hugely successful SETI@Home project…