RE: [chottala.com] Secrets of BIG BANG experiment

News World 13 September 2008 Largest particle collider conducts successful test   The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring 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 at 10:26 a.m. (0826 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the 4 billion Swiss francs ($3.8 billion) Large Hadron Collider -- described as the biggest physics experiment in history. "There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.   There were celebrations in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.   "Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.   The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons -- a type of subatomic particle -- around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with the first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (0735 GMT).   Now that the beam has been successfully tested in a clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.   "My first thought was relief," said Evans, who has been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning has been a great start."   He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months."   The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide. The collider's two largest detectors -- essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons -- are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second. 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 --which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.   The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated slightly in the morning's testing, leading to a pause to recool them before trying the opposite direction.   The start of the collider came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the earth by creating 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. CERN was backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking who declared 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. Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power. 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 that contributed US$531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.   Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.   The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment. The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time, told The Associated Press.   Five facts about CERN's Large Hadron Collider These are five facts about the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will smash together particles at close to the speed of light after its start-up on Wednesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN):   * Though built to study the smallest known building blocks of all things -- known as particles -- the LHC is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground, straddling French and Swiss territory.   * At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 percent the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600 million collisions every second.   * When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space. Meanwhile, the cooling system that circulates superfluid helium around the LHC's accelerator ring keeps the machine at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.34 degrees Fahrenheit).   * To collect data of up to 600 million proton collisions per second, physicists and scientists have built devices to measure the passage time of a particle to a few billionths of a second. The trigger system also registers the location of particles to millionths of a meter.   * The data recorded by the LHC's big experiments will fill around 100,000 dual-layer DVDs each year. Tens of thousands of computers around the world have been harnessed in a computing network called "The Grid" that will hold the information.   WHAT IS THE BIG BANG? The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, on Wednesday began an experiment to recreate conditions surrounding the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth to the universe. Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will seek to collide two beams of particles at nearly the speed of light. Scientists will circulate a beam in one direction around the accelerator, then the other, later sending beams both ways to cause collisions. Following are some facts about the Big Bang and CERN's particle-smashing experiment:   Recreating the Big Bang   * The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project's accelerator into the 27-km beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter- clockwise around it for about 3 km.   * The collider aims to simulate conditions milliseconds after the "Big Bang" which created the universe around 13.7 billion years ago.   * The collisions, in which both particle clusters will be traveling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible.   * The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the "Higgs Boson" after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.   What is the Big Bang?   * Recreating a "Big Bang," which most scientists believe is the only explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believes.   * Its essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a tiny speck about the size of a coin but in a state of extremely high temperature and density.   * The name "Big Bang" was coined in 1949 by British scientist Fred Hoyle to disparage a then emerging theory about origins that countered his own "steady state" view: that the universe had always existed and was evolving but not expanding.   * According to the Big-Bang model, the universe expanded rapidly from a highly compressed primordial state, which resulted in a significant decrease in density and temperature. Soon afterward, the dominance of matter over antimatter (as observed today) may have been established by processes that also predict proton decay. During this stage many types of elementary particles may have been present. After a few seconds, the universe cooled enough to allow the formation of certain nuclei.   * The theory predicts that definite amounts of hydrogen, helium, and lithium were produced. Their abundances agree with what is observed today. About 1,000,000 years later the universe was sufficiently cool for atoms to form. What is CERN?   * CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.   * Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States, plus 6 actively participant observers including the United States and Russia. AP  GENEVA

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The Large Hadron Collider Will Not Destroy the World Tomorrow, or Ever

By Matt Blum September 09, 2008 | 7:30:00 AMCategories: Physics  

 
You'd better read this today, because it's possible the world will end tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the probability of doomsday isn't any higher than it is on any normal Wednesday, but there's been a fair bit of kerfuffle and hullabaloo over the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and whether it will create a black hole that will destroy the entire planet. There's even been a rap written about it.
Now, more skilled scientific minds than mine have debunked these doomsayers, but the stories are out there, and kids are bound to hear them. They're bound to have questions, including wanting to know what a hadron is, why scientists want to smash them together, and, by the way, are these European scientists about to suck the world into a black hole? Well, if they've taken high school chemistry, they've probably learned about protons and neutrons, so you can explain that both of those are in fact types of hadrons. You probably don't want to get into their valence quarks, unless you really understand quantum physics and don't mind your kids tuning you out. As for why they're doing it, it boils down to the search for the Higgs boson, also called the "God Particle," which is the only elementary particle that has never been observed by science. If your kids ask why that's so important, point out that it was nuclear research that led to the creation of the Internet, and they may just finally understand why science is so important! If they're also interested in how the LHC works, point them to this explanation on HowStuffWorks.
Now, the other question is a bit tougher, because you (I assume) don't want to outright lie to your kids, but you don't want to alarm them, either. It is actually possible, as I understand it, that the experiment will create subatomic black holes that will last a tiny fraction of a second before collapsing. But the likelihood of these black holes becoming the more well-known kind of black hole is nearly nonexistent.
That being said, if you've raised your kids in the proper GeekDad fashion, they'll have read a lot of science fiction by the time they hit high school. And sci-fi is, of course, full of stories about scientists with good intentions going too far and causing horrible consequences. So it's entirely understandable if your kids are a bit concerned about what's going on on the border between Switzerland and France.
My advice? Just tell them that there's really no chance at all that the world will end in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. Seriously, how many times can you tell your kids something about the future without even the slightest worry you'll be proved wrong? If you tell them that and you're wrong, I guarantee your kids will never confront you about it.
OK, that may not have been as reassuring as I'd intended. Sorry about that. Seriously, unless every preeminent physicist in the world is very wrong, the LHC is perfectly safe. That's good enough for me.

 

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Large Hadron Collider "Actually Worked"

Mason Inman
for National Geographic News

September 10, 2008

The world's largest atom smasher's first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.  
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.
 

Enlarge Photo

 

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Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.

"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.

One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing raucous applause.

 

"First of all, I didn't believe it," said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.

 

"I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!"

 

"Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly," said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.

 

(Also see "Large Hadron Collider Rap Video Is a Hit" [September 10, 2008].

Birth of the Universe

 
The collider "was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), on Tuesday. "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
 

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CERN collider completes first test, now for the "Big Bang"

Ian Brockwell

September 10, 2008

 

Scientists from all over the world were celebrating today after the initial tests on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proved successful. The experiment, carried out on the Swiss-French border, was able to send particle beams in both directions along a 27 km underground chamber.

The experiment has attracted a lot of controversy and many have feared that the device could cause the destruction of our planet (by creating Black Holes for example), although the scientists involved have laughed off such suggestions as "ridiculous"

Whilst some of those, who expressed concern over this mornings experiment, may be relieved to find our planet still in one piece, it should be pointed out that today´s tests were nothing more than an opportunity to check the basic functions of the collider.

The real test, to try and recreate the conditions of the "Big Bang", are yet to come. This is where the scientists plan to smash particle beams together, with protons traveling at close to the speed of light. The date for this part of the experiment has yet to be decided, but after today´s test it is expected quite soon.

Scientists hope that by smashing the particles together, the result may make it possible to better understand things like gravity and mass. They also hope to find the theoretical particle called the "Higgs Boson", named after the Scottish scientist Peter Higgs, who first suggested its existence in 1964.

The Higgs Boson, also known as the "God particle" is believed to give matter its mass.

Although there was a minor "glitch" during the test this morning, generally things went according to plan. However, some may worry about Lyn Evans (project leader) words when he said "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning we had a great start."

Should we be worried by the CERN collider experiments? The experts tell us that there is nothing to worry about, but they are exploring very new territory and one has to wonder whether there is an element of wishful thinking involved.

However, there seems to be little chance of stopping these experiments from going ahead and I guess we shall find out the truth soon enough. If the scientists are right, we should make some interesting discoveries. If they are wrong, it won´t really matter as we may end up being swallowed by a Black Hole!

I´d like to conclude by making an observation. According to some scientists, the creation of the universe began with an incredibly dense object (the size of a small coin) which exploded in a void (the Big Bang), throwing out matter that created all the Stars and Planets (including our own of course). If such a small object can do that, couldn´t an experiment recreating this effect do the same (but on a much smaller scale)? It may not be large enough to create a new universe, but if it really does reproduce a small scale "Big Bang", can we be really certain that it won´t cause an explosion large enough to destroy our planet or even our solar system?

I´m no scientist, but if the experiment is to discover the creation of the universe, it should recreate the exact same conditions (on a smaller scale of course). If it doesn´t, what will it prove? If the conditions are being repeated exactly, surely this must present a danger of some kind?

Sadly, if I am right, I won´t be around to say "I told you so". But then no one else will be here to listen anyway!

 

 

 

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From: mdashrafulamin@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:05:30 +0600
Subject: [chottala.com] Secrets of BIG BANG experiment

Landmark experiment to unlock secrets of Big Bang could cause end of the world, say scientists in court bid to halt it It has cost £4.4billion and is designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang. But rather than providing vital information about the beginning of life, the world's biggest experiment could cause the end of the world, say scientists. They fear that the Large Hadron Collider  -  due to be switched on in nine days' time  -  will create a black hole that could swallow the planet. The Large Hadron Collider smashes particles together at nearly the speed of light By smashing sub-atomic particles together at close to the speed of light, the LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe or Big Bang, shedding light on the building blocks of life. But critics claim that the 'time machine', which has been built 300ft beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, could instead spawn a shower of mini-black holes. Within four years, one of these 'celestial vacuums' could have swollen to such a size that it is capable of sucking the Earth inside-out, said Otto Rossler, one of a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge to the project. They claim the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. However, the case at the European Court of Human Rights is not expected to delay the switch on, scheduled for Wednesday of next week. Professor Rossler, a German chemist, said the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has admitted its project will create black holes but doesn't consider them to be a risk. Artist's impression of the Big Bang, the titanic explosion which cosmologists believe created the Universe about 15 billion years ago. He warned: 'My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside. I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.' Those involved in the project have dismissed the claims as 'absurd' and insist that extensive safety assessments have found the experiment, which is funded by 20 countries, including the UK, to be safe. A report written earlier this year stated: 'Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments  -  and the planet still exists.' The lifespan of any mini-black holes would be 'very short', it added. Critics say the LHC could create a black hole which expands until it swallows the Earth CERN spokesman James Gillies said the arguments before the European Court of Human Rights had been answered in 'extensive safety assessments'. He told the Sunday Telegraph: 'The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays. If they were dangerous we would know about it already.' Scientists have used large particle colliders to smash atoms and pieces of atoms together for 30 years, but this machine has attracted so much attention because it is the most powerful ever built. In the LHC beams of protons will be propelled through an 18-mile-long circular tunnel. More than 5,000 magnets lining the tunnel will accelerate the hundreds of billions of tiny particles to almost the speed of light, allowing them to complete one circuit in one-11,000th of a second. There will be two beams going in opposite directions, each packing as much energy as a car travelling at 100mph. When they reach almost the speed of light, they will be smashed head on into each other, breaking them into their constituent parts, including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe.

--
Mohammad Ashraful Amin
Asst. Comissioner & Magistrate
N.D.C, Natore,Bangladesh

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