Jesus Diaz September 22, 2011
http://gizmodo.com/5843006/faster-than-light-particles-could-wreck-einsteins-relativity-theory
This is extremely shocking: CERN scientists using a 1300-ton particle detector have measured particles travelling faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, this discovery could invalidate Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity and revolutionize physics.
Einstein's theory says that there's nothing in the universe that could travel faster than light. Now, CERN scientists believe this may be wrong according to their latest experiment.
The 3-year experiment timed about 16,000 neutrino packets launched from CERN facilities in Geneva, travelling through Earth and arriving 2.43 milliseconds later to the subterranean facilities of Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. There, the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (the OPERA particle detector) recorded the hits.
When scientists discovered that the particles were arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light—with only a 10 nanosecond error margin—they freaked out. I don't blame them. Imagine someone comes to you to tell you that a new observation shows that planet Earth is actually flat.
But University of Bern's Antonio Ereditato—spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA team—says that the experiment is "a straightforward time-of-flight measurement." It was repeatable, so they couldn't ignore it because that would be dishonest: "[T]he consequences can be very serious [...] We are forced to say something [...] We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them."
The news are so extraordinary that other physicists are already saying this is impossible. Chang Kee Jung—a neutrino physicist at Stony Brook University in New York—believes it's a systematic error. Jung is the spokesperson for a similar project in Japan. Indiana University's physicist Alan Kostelecky believes that, while it may be possible that neutrinos can travel faster than light, the experiment needs to be repeated "by at least one and preferably several experiments." There are other facilities that could be used to run the same test, one of them is Fermilab in Chicago. The other one is the T2K experiment in Japan, the one in which Jung participates.
Still, Kostelecky confesses that he "would be delighted if it were true." I would be delighted too. I love when the world goes crazy.
Showing posts with label CERN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CERN. Show all posts
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Friday, October 29, 2010
Stuff You Should Know: The Future
http://www.thesmokingjacket.com/entertainment/stuff-you-should-know-the-future
Stuff You Should Know: The Future
10/26/2010
Kristi
Just because we’re not flying around on Hoverboard jet cars, ingesting meals in tablet form and still alive despite the Y2K disaster that never happened, doesn’t mean that we’ve completely failed at the future. It only means the future has failed us. Or that we’re really bad at predicting the future. Probably that second one. Here are a few other things you might not know about the future.
1. Newton Got Time Wrong
Isaac Newton saw time as absolute, meaning it flows at the same rate for anyone anywhere in the universe. Einstein disagreed. His theory of special relativity replaced absolute time with spacetime, which is a model that puts time as the 4th dimension of the universe, after length, width and depth. Furthermore, according to Einstein, under the right conditions and with the right tools, time traveling to the future is theoretically possible. Score! Which leads us to…
2. Stephen Hawking Can Totally Build Us a Time Machine!
Kinda. OK, that was misleading. The title should have read, “Stephen Hawking Theoretically Knows What We Need to Do to Build a Time Machine That Will Take Us to the Future.” All we need for time travel, according to Hawking and every other scientist ever, is to go really, really fast. Almost as fast as the speed of light.
Sounds impossible, right? Wrong. Two words: particle accelerator. Over at CERN in Switzerland, physicists are pushing particles to almost the speed of light, and here’s where things get freaky. At that rate of acceleration, time for the particles slooooowwws down, which is why they live 30 times longer than they would in regular time. Apply those principles to a magic train that orbits the earth and boom! Time machine, yo.
3. Ancient People Saw Time as Cyclical
And that’s why they thought they could predict the future; because it’s all happened before. After all, the seasons, the stars, animal migrations and even humans acted in a predictable cycle, why not time itself? The Mayans, the Buddhists, Greek and Romans, Babylonians, Hindus, pretty much everyone, saw time as a wheel with repeating ages. St. Augustine put the kibosh on wheel time for Christians (and therefore the entire Western world) when he asserted that time began at Creation, will end when God says so, and everything and everyone only happens once.
4. But He Didn’t Stop People From Trying Their Darndest to Predict the Future
Not by a long shot. Over the years people have believed they could predict the future using stars, tea leaves, crystal balls, tarot cards, spirit boards, even urine bubbles, cheese shapes and poop.
5. But What People Really Love Doing is Predicting Doomsday
The first Christians believed Jesus was coming back in their lifetime, and that his coming would usher in God’s reign on earth and the end of human time. Over the years, Christians and non-Christians alike have tried to pin a date on when this all will take place. They’re almost always wrong.
New England farmer William Miller thought the Bible pointed to October 22, 1844 as the day Jesus was going to get his return on. Pat Robertson thought 1982 would be the big year. The folks with the Heaven’s Gate cult thought the end of the world was imminent, and that mass suicide would allow them to catch a ride with some aliens trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. In fairness, we’re not entirely sure they were wrong.
Even pop singers who look curiously like Alan Cumming and Steve Zahn have gotten into prognosticating the future act:
"In the Year 2525" by Zager & Evans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNM2K8cmU8
6. This Just In: The World Will Not End in 2012
No, really. It turns out this big Mayan Calendar thing that everyone’s been talking about is off by 50 to 100 years. Not only will the world not end in 2012, but no one has any idea where they miscalculated when they converted the Mayan calendar to the modern Gregorian calendar. So, technically the end of the world may have already happened, according to Mayan prophesies.
Hope you didn’t already cash in your insurance policies!
7. Even Scientists Can Be Way Off About the Future
In 1974, Time magazine predicted a coming Ice Age, citing global cooler temperatures, “persistent pack ice” and many other dangerous warning signs as their evidence:
“Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend.”
So close. Change one word in that statement and they would have nailed it.
8. Science Fiction Writers, However, are Excellent Future Predictors
2001: A Space Odyssey totally predicted the iPad in 1968. Arthur C. Clarke called it a “newspad.”
“…he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers… he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him…the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. …”
H.G. Wells called genetic engineering in 1896’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, police are testing out software that predicts crime before it happens, just like in Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and in 1863 Jules Verne predicted the Internet, gas powered cars, skyscrapers, calculators and the building of the freakin’ Eiffel Tower, 23 years before it was actually built.
9. Futurists are Real World Scientists Who Are Paid to Predict the Future
Not joking, it’s a completely real, not made up job. And the best part of this job is that futurists can just make up whatever they feel like and call it a prediction. I’m going to be a futurist and predict you’ll read on to the the next sentence.
Ha! I did it! Someone get me a turban!
This year, Japanese futurists came up with some pretty cool educated guesses about what our future will look like:
•By 2022, synthetic blood will make blood transfusions unnecessary
•In 2026, we’ll finally have our robot maids.
•In 2031, we should finally be able to orbit the Earth for funsies.
•By 2038, we’ll have aircraft that doesn’t run on fossil fuel.
•And we’ll finally get that moon station we’ve been hoping for since the 1960’s in 2040.
Way to speed things along, science.
10. Other Than the Hoverboard Thing, Back to the Future II is Working Out Nicely, Thank You
Especially in the not-awesome predictions of the movie like constant, highly targeted advertising and surveillance cameras everywhere. But they also got telephone conversations via TV right, and that was just made possible this year. They also nailed hands-free video games, mobile payments and a kind of proto-version of social media. Hellooooo, Facebook.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520193,00.html
The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter
Thursday, May 14, 2009
By Jeremy Hsu
An antimatter explosion threatens to level the Vatican in the movie adaptation of the thriller "Angels and Demons," but real-world physicists are unfazed by this plot.
The story features "Da Vinci Code" hero Robert Langdon racing to recover an antimatter capsule stolen from the CERN particle physics facility in Switzerland. Researchers first figured out how to create and trap antimatter particles at CERN, which gave author Dan Brown the inspiration for his story.
One physicist doesn't find CERN's unexpected publicity from the story upsetting. On the contrary, he's rather pleased.
"I always say that what Dan Brown did for the Roman Catholic Church in 'The Da Vinci Code,' he did for me and my research with 'Angels and Demons,'" said Gerald Gabrielse, a Harvard physicist who currently leads an international research team at CERN.
Antimatter is real, but it still represents a baffling presence in the universe – sub-atomic particles that are the opposite of normal matter. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they mutually annihilate each other and release their entire mass as energy.
This bizarre but intriguing reality has prompted plenty of science fiction writers to dream of antimatter engines powering future civilizations or starships, such as Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise.
"Angels and Demons" twists that dream of untapped energy into more of a nightmarish scenario, by suggesting what might happen if a relatively large amount of antimatter annihilated itself with matter all at once. A quarter of a gram of antimatter threatens to unleash the power of 5,000 tons of TNT and destroy everything within a half-mile radius – or so goes the fictional story.
The reality is that physicists can only wish they had so much of the stuff.
"If you take all the antimatter produced in the history of the world and annihilated it all at once, you wouldn't have enough energy to boil a cup of tea," Gabrielse told LiveScience.
Antimatter represents a rare entity in a universe dominated by matter, and scientists still struggle to understand why. What they do know is that creating antimatter requires tremendous effort, such as using particle accelerators at CERN to smash together particles at nearly the speed of light.
An occasional antimatter particle may arise naturally when a cosmic ray strikes Earth's upper atmosphere. But collecting man-made antimatter particles is much more practical for research.
Physicists have only slowed and trapped a small fraction of all the produced particles, in this case known as antiprotons. They use antimatter traps somewhat similar in concept to what "Angels and Demons" describes, with magnetic fields keeping the antimatter particles in a vacuum away from any matter.
"You need a container with no walls, that's the idea," Gabrielse noted. His former project, known as TRAP, successfully created and held charged antiprotons for months.
Now physicists face the more daunting challenge of capturing neutral antihydrogen atoms. The newer international effort, called ATRAP, has put together an antihydrogen trap and is working on a second.
"We are trying right now to trap neutral antihydrogen atoms which we have produced, but no one has succeeded in proving that they've been trapped yet," Gabrielse said.
Such neutral antihydrogen atoms could theoretically be clumped together, whereas charged antiprotons are repelled by each other. Whether an antimatter clump would annihilate with all the power of a small nuke without blowing itself apart remains an open question – and that still assumes physicists can create and collect anything close to a quarter of a gram of antimatter.
One part of "Angels and Demons" may have come true, although unrelated to antimatter. The fictional plot includes retinal scanners guarding a CERN lab, and the real-life CERN happened to adopt such eyeball security after the book came out, Gabrielse explained.
So the plot of "Angels and Demons" doesn't quite annihilate upon contact with reality, but the real-life mystery of antimatter may still trump fiction.
"Why the universe is made out of more matter than antimatter? We don't know the answer to that question at all," Gabrielse said.
The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter
Thursday, May 14, 2009
By Jeremy Hsu
An antimatter explosion threatens to level the Vatican in the movie adaptation of the thriller "Angels and Demons," but real-world physicists are unfazed by this plot.
The story features "Da Vinci Code" hero Robert Langdon racing to recover an antimatter capsule stolen from the CERN particle physics facility in Switzerland. Researchers first figured out how to create and trap antimatter particles at CERN, which gave author Dan Brown the inspiration for his story.
One physicist doesn't find CERN's unexpected publicity from the story upsetting. On the contrary, he's rather pleased.
"I always say that what Dan Brown did for the Roman Catholic Church in 'The Da Vinci Code,' he did for me and my research with 'Angels and Demons,'" said Gerald Gabrielse, a Harvard physicist who currently leads an international research team at CERN.
Antimatter is real, but it still represents a baffling presence in the universe – sub-atomic particles that are the opposite of normal matter. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they mutually annihilate each other and release their entire mass as energy.
This bizarre but intriguing reality has prompted plenty of science fiction writers to dream of antimatter engines powering future civilizations or starships, such as Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise.
"Angels and Demons" twists that dream of untapped energy into more of a nightmarish scenario, by suggesting what might happen if a relatively large amount of antimatter annihilated itself with matter all at once. A quarter of a gram of antimatter threatens to unleash the power of 5,000 tons of TNT and destroy everything within a half-mile radius – or so goes the fictional story.
The reality is that physicists can only wish they had so much of the stuff.
"If you take all the antimatter produced in the history of the world and annihilated it all at once, you wouldn't have enough energy to boil a cup of tea," Gabrielse told LiveScience.
Antimatter represents a rare entity in a universe dominated by matter, and scientists still struggle to understand why. What they do know is that creating antimatter requires tremendous effort, such as using particle accelerators at CERN to smash together particles at nearly the speed of light.
An occasional antimatter particle may arise naturally when a cosmic ray strikes Earth's upper atmosphere. But collecting man-made antimatter particles is much more practical for research.
Physicists have only slowed and trapped a small fraction of all the produced particles, in this case known as antiprotons. They use antimatter traps somewhat similar in concept to what "Angels and Demons" describes, with magnetic fields keeping the antimatter particles in a vacuum away from any matter.
"You need a container with no walls, that's the idea," Gabrielse noted. His former project, known as TRAP, successfully created and held charged antiprotons for months.
Now physicists face the more daunting challenge of capturing neutral antihydrogen atoms. The newer international effort, called ATRAP, has put together an antihydrogen trap and is working on a second.
"We are trying right now to trap neutral antihydrogen atoms which we have produced, but no one has succeeded in proving that they've been trapped yet," Gabrielse said.
Such neutral antihydrogen atoms could theoretically be clumped together, whereas charged antiprotons are repelled by each other. Whether an antimatter clump would annihilate with all the power of a small nuke without blowing itself apart remains an open question – and that still assumes physicists can create and collect anything close to a quarter of a gram of antimatter.
One part of "Angels and Demons" may have come true, although unrelated to antimatter. The fictional plot includes retinal scanners guarding a CERN lab, and the real-life CERN happened to adopt such eyeball security after the book came out, Gabrielse explained.
So the plot of "Angels and Demons" doesn't quite annihilate upon contact with reality, but the real-life mystery of antimatter may still trump fiction.
"Why the universe is made out of more matter than antimatter? We don't know the answer to that question at all," Gabrielse said.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Hadron Collider to be turned off for two months
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/20/scilhc120.xml
Large Hadron Collider to be turned off for two months following damage
20/09/2008
A faulty connection between two magnets has triggered a meltdown which will delay the world’s biggest science experiment by two months, the Cern laboratory has admitted.
The fire brigade was called to the Large Hadron Collider after the fault, which sent temperatures soaring by 100 degrees celsius in a section of the 17-mile underground circuit on the Swiss-French border.
The first protons circulated in the huge collider on September 10 before an estimated television audience of one billion, and initial progress seemed to be smooth.
Last week the Welshman in charge of the collider, Dr Lyn "the Atom" Evans, told the Telegraph that he expected to collide the first particles next week, much earlier than thought. But the breakdown, at 11am UK time on Friday morning, led to the release of a ton of helium used to cool the magnets that guide subatomic particles around the machines’s circuit. Engineers had to wait for oxygen levels to return to normal before they were able to weigh up the damage.
When they did, their verdict came as a major blow. The failure will delay the process of commissioning by at least two months, said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern, the European particle physics laboratory.
"This kind of incident was always a possibility with such a unique and demanding project, that’s why we were so tense on the 10th," commented Prof Jonathan Butterworth of University College London, the UK head of the Atlas detector, which will study collisions.
"Having seen those tantalising first signs of beam in our detectors, everyone is raring to go. So it’s really disappointing, and hard for us to keep in perspective right now. "But a delay like this in a 20-year project isn’t an utter disaster and I’m sure the team at Cern will fix it, and make it more robust as they go." The explanation for the delay lies in how the giant machine relies on both the lowest temperature and the highest vacuum to collide particles – protons – at a shade under the speed of light. Liquid helium is used to cool the LHC’s so-called "superconducting magnets".
These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy, and thus offering the ability to generate vast magnetic fields. There was a faulty connection between two magnets, explained Gillies. As a result, during a power test, the high current melted the connection and helium leaked out from the magnet, which is located under the Jura mountains, and the vacuum was lost. This change, called a quench, releases stored energy.
"It seems to be the faulty connection that quenched. It stopped superconducting, which led it to heat up and melt, which in turn seems to have caused the mechanical failure that released helium," said Gillies. The massive quench took place between two focusing "quadrupole" magnets in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors, the "eyes" of the machine that study collisions. As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine’s final sector rose by around 100C.
One of the eight sectors of the giant machine will now have to return to room temperature and pressure for the magnet to be repaired, or even replaced, if necessary. While a repair of the magnet itself would take no more than two days, it will take "several weeks" to warm up the sector and then another "several weeks" to cool it down again, explained Gillies.
The magnets in that sector will have to be pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K, or 80 deg above absolute zero ) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K). The setback came just a day after the LHC’s beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.
Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University said: "It's disappointing of course to have to wait another couple of months for the physics to begin, but with a machine as complex as the LHC these things will happen in the commissioning stage.
"When we do wonderful and difficult things at the very edge of our capability we can't expect everything to go smoothly, but this is the price we must pay to make the most profound discoveries about our Universe."
Jad Marrouche, Imperial College London, who works on the CMS detector, said: "Having been so close to taking the first data from collisions, we are all disappointed that we will have to wait just that little bit longer.
"Preparations were gathering pace, especially with the very fast progress made by the collider team of late, so it feels a bit like there has been a false start at the 100m finals."
Large Hadron Collider to be turned off for two months following damage
20/09/2008
A faulty connection between two magnets has triggered a meltdown which will delay the world’s biggest science experiment by two months, the Cern laboratory has admitted.
The fire brigade was called to the Large Hadron Collider after the fault, which sent temperatures soaring by 100 degrees celsius in a section of the 17-mile underground circuit on the Swiss-French border.
The first protons circulated in the huge collider on September 10 before an estimated television audience of one billion, and initial progress seemed to be smooth.
Last week the Welshman in charge of the collider, Dr Lyn "the Atom" Evans, told the Telegraph that he expected to collide the first particles next week, much earlier than thought. But the breakdown, at 11am UK time on Friday morning, led to the release of a ton of helium used to cool the magnets that guide subatomic particles around the machines’s circuit. Engineers had to wait for oxygen levels to return to normal before they were able to weigh up the damage.
When they did, their verdict came as a major blow. The failure will delay the process of commissioning by at least two months, said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern, the European particle physics laboratory.
"This kind of incident was always a possibility with such a unique and demanding project, that’s why we were so tense on the 10th," commented Prof Jonathan Butterworth of University College London, the UK head of the Atlas detector, which will study collisions.
"Having seen those tantalising first signs of beam in our detectors, everyone is raring to go. So it’s really disappointing, and hard for us to keep in perspective right now. "But a delay like this in a 20-year project isn’t an utter disaster and I’m sure the team at Cern will fix it, and make it more robust as they go." The explanation for the delay lies in how the giant machine relies on both the lowest temperature and the highest vacuum to collide particles – protons – at a shade under the speed of light. Liquid helium is used to cool the LHC’s so-called "superconducting magnets".
These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy, and thus offering the ability to generate vast magnetic fields. There was a faulty connection between two magnets, explained Gillies. As a result, during a power test, the high current melted the connection and helium leaked out from the magnet, which is located under the Jura mountains, and the vacuum was lost. This change, called a quench, releases stored energy.
"It seems to be the faulty connection that quenched. It stopped superconducting, which led it to heat up and melt, which in turn seems to have caused the mechanical failure that released helium," said Gillies. The massive quench took place between two focusing "quadrupole" magnets in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors, the "eyes" of the machine that study collisions. As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine’s final sector rose by around 100C.
One of the eight sectors of the giant machine will now have to return to room temperature and pressure for the magnet to be repaired, or even replaced, if necessary. While a repair of the magnet itself would take no more than two days, it will take "several weeks" to warm up the sector and then another "several weeks" to cool it down again, explained Gillies.
The magnets in that sector will have to be pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K, or 80 deg above absolute zero ) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K). The setback came just a day after the LHC’s beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.
Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University said: "It's disappointing of course to have to wait another couple of months for the physics to begin, but with a machine as complex as the LHC these things will happen in the commissioning stage.
"When we do wonderful and difficult things at the very edge of our capability we can't expect everything to go smoothly, but this is the price we must pay to make the most profound discoveries about our Universe."
Jad Marrouche, Imperial College London, who works on the CMS detector, said: "Having been so close to taking the first data from collisions, we are all disappointed that we will have to wait just that little bit longer.
"Preparations were gathering pace, especially with the very fast progress made by the collider team of late, so it feels a bit like there has been a false start at the 100m finals."
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Massive particle collider passes first key tests
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g5nGPtmoUVIJDgehVJ_snD6vDA6gD933SR900
Massive particle collider passes first key tests
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
9-10-8
GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions 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 clockwise along the full length of the 4 billion Swiss franc (US$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.
Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.
Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.
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).
Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time 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 first test, 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.
Maiani and the other three living former directors-general attended the launch Wednesday.
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.
On the Net:
CERN: http://www.cern.ch
The U.S. at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/
Massive particle collider passes first key tests
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
9-10-8
GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions 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 clockwise along the full length of the 4 billion Swiss franc (US$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.
Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.
Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.
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).
Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time 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 first test, 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.
Maiani and the other three living former directors-general attended the launch Wednesday.
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.
On the Net:
CERN: http://www.cern.ch
The U.S. at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/
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