‘Big Bang Machine’ Set to Start Up Wednesday
GENEVA — It’s been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.
Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.
The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.
— Click HERE to read how some fear the collider could bring about the end of the world.
The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.
The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets.
It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro “black holes” and endanger the planet.
The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project’s price tag of nearly $4 billion.
“This only happens once a generation,” said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. “People are certainly very excited.”
The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages.
The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border.
Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel.
CERN dismisses the risk of micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project.
They unsuccessfully mounted a similar action in 1999 to block the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.
CERN’s collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN.
Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons — previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom — were made of still smaller quarks and gluons.
CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.
Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman’s terms.
The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine’s investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang.
“We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other,” Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN.
“This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma.”
The soup cools quickly and the quarks and gluons stick together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.
That will enable scientists to look for still missing pieces to the puzzle — or lead to the formulation of a new theory on the makeup of matter.
Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has produced the Large Hadron Rap, a video clip that has attracted more than a million views on YouTube.
“The things that it discovers will rock you in the head,” McAlpine raps as she dances in the tunnel and caverns.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said the lyrics are “absolutely scientifically spot on.”
“It’s quite brilliant,” Gillies said.
[AP Photos: Above – One of the control rooms of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Prevessin, France…Headline image – Part of the Large Hadron Collider’s particle pathway in a tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland.]
callum says
stop while you can
Ryan Fryer says
Why do people feel the need to do this…
honestly people should get abit more of a heads up on these things
we should be able to vote if we want things like this to happen or not
i couldnt give a S**t about what they find out?
pointless
Adrien says
Still cracking me up!
no seriously I think it’s great what they’re doing. Makes me wish I’d actually gone into Cosmology and could be maybe apart of this. I can totally hear K from Men In Black talking about how people are stupid dangerious creatures and it’s SO TRUE. People get a liiiittle negative feedback about a project and suddenly it’s the end of the world when they have no idea about the physics behind any of this.
DJ Monte says
If there is the slightest risk of the atom smasher going wrong and sucking up the planet earth why would you ever take it. I would wait longer just to be 100% sure or cancel it. even if its 1 out of 3 million there still is a chance it can happen, the world is too great of a place to risk.
Were all (not) gonna die! says
Its neva gonna happen, Chance 1 in 99999999999999999999999 ~~million
Sam Sloan says
The risks of someone dying in a car crash are significantly greater than anything bad happening from this experiment, but I don’t see anyone deciding to not get behind the wheel of their cars everyday and go to wherever it is they feel they need to be.
Kyle C. says
i highly disagree with this experiment… i say before anything that could be “life changing” in any dramatic way such as this is done, we have an international vote. and i don’t mean just the “scientists who know best”… i mean humankind… EVERYONE that is literate… we as one cannot afford such a grave mistake as to have a malfunction…
luke says
… i personally am shitting my self. if something does go wrong ( even though nothing probably will) i will have less than 1 20th of a second to think about it… that means that if something does go wrong the scientists will have 1 20th of a second to fix it.
harry says
The worlds going to END!!!!!!!
do what you want!
wez says
its an ace experiment but why would you take the chance of destruction of earth?do us humans not have a say if we want to live or not?basicly these sciencetist decided if we live or not.But on the other hand if it was that dangerous and could cause all these problems dont you think there would be an state of an emergancy?you really think people would be going to work?or on the news dont you think it would be main headlines and people would go insane?look around you everyone is carrying on with there lives,i dont think they would do it if it was dangerous theres to many important people in the world like world leaders,the queen,buisness been affected,no its still as normal as it allways has been.
well done for passion into an experiment.