Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most ambitious piece of machinery ever conceived and built by man. The particle accelerator, with a circumference of 27km, is located at the CERN facility with straddles the border of France and Switzerland.
The LHC was powered up on Wednesday 10 September 2008, with the first beams being circulated through the collider. It reached full power in mid-November 2008, which is when scientists were supposed to begin smashing particles into each other. This was hampered however as the LHC suffered a mechanical breakdown soon after it was switched on and will not be active again until early 2009.
The LHC has four giant detectors designed to probe new dimensions, search for the Higgs Boson (the so called "God Particle", which gives matter and other bosons mass) and hypothetically to investigate what the universe might have been like immediately after the Big Bang (assuming it actually happened).
Legal challenges have been made against the LHC as some believe it could open a microscopic black hole that would swallow the Earth. However scientists have effectively ruled out this scenario, pointing out - among other things - that such particle collisions take place quite often naturally.[1][2] The LHC seeks to prove or disprove other important concepts and theories, including supersymmetry, antimatter, as well as confirming the existence of many leptons, such as the muon and gluon. Ethical challenges have been raised as well, with many considering the search for the so-called "God particle" to be a sign of human hubris. An analogy can be made to the Biblical tower of Babel.
References
- ↑ Steven B. Giddings, Michelangelo M. Mangano: "Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes"
- ↑ Benjamin Koch, Marcus Bleicher, Horst Stoecker: "Exclusion of black hole disaster scenarios at the LHC"
External Links
LHC Homepage at CERN.
