Word: lhc
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ATLAS occupies just one small corner of the strange and wonderful world that is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the circular, 14-mile-underground particle accelerator that promises scientists untold insights into the mysteries of the cosmos. More than 25 years in the planning, with a price tag of about $10 billion, the LHC officially - finally - began smashing protons together on March 30. The goal: to answer the most fundamental questions about how the universe works. (See pictures of the LHC...
...find the Higgs boson is to create an environment that mimics the moment post-Big Bang. The powerful LHC runs at up to 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) and sends particles through temperatures colder than deep space at velocities approaching the speed of light. (The second most powerful particle accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, runs at 1 TeV.) The added juice allows scientists to get closer to the high energy that existed after the Big Bang. And high energies are needed, because the Higgs is thought to be quite heavy. (In Einstein's famous equation E=MC2, C represents...
...cusp of human knowledge, particle physics can seem esoteric indeed. But the LHC's findings may have implications that go beyond pure science. CERN, a pan-European project dedicated to peaceful nuclear research, was founded in the late 1940s as a sort of atonement for the legacies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and two wars during which Europeans slaughtered one another by the millions - many of CERN's elder scientists vividly remember the instability, randomness and despair that characterized that...
...Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again after a string of unlikely setbacks, the latest caused when a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird interfered with the 17-mile-long particle accelerator's equipment in early November. On Nov. 23, the LHC sent two proton beams bashing into each other for the very first time, bringing scientists one step closer to finding the hypothetical Higgs boson particle and unlocking the secrets of the universe's creation. If preliminary tests continue to go smoothly, the LHC will start running full-speed collisions in early...
...what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs' former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC's delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent...