Word: lhc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...universe its mass (some physicists call it the God Particle). Previous detectors at CERN and Fermilab near Chicago have failed to find the elusive Higgs, and a planned supercollider in Texas designed to confirm its existence was never finished after Congress cancelled funding in 1993. Now that the LHC is on the quest, some observers herald Europe as the new center of pure scientific research...
...LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "Its research program has the potential to change our view of the universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that's as old as mankind itself." (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...tangible results of atomic research in the past 50 years have been bombs capable of ending all life on earth. CERN officials refer to the laboratory as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics because they feel "nuclear" in the literal translation carries negative implications, and tour guides at the LHC are quick to point out that the accelerator has no weapons applications...
Scientists believe the LHC's results will help fill in gaps in the Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of subatomic particles that is the closest that modern physics comes to a testable "theory of everything." For example, scientists believe the LHC will produce a particle, the Higgs Boson, that will end debate over how matter in the universe acquires mass. It could even provide evidence for more ambitious theories of the universe, such as string theory, which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, the previously known laws of the small and large that...
...Williams also believes that the flip side of such fear is faith in the redemptive potential of science (there are equally irrational websites about CERN, for example, that predict the LHC will create wormholes to distant corners of the universe, where humanity can escape to other inhabitable planets). Williams wrote in an e-mail: "I have come to see that in their early days, new technology and scientific breakthroughs often serve as Rorschach tests - a phenomenon about which we have little concrete understanding, onto which contemporary social anxieties (and dreams) can readily be projected. As a result we find (often...