Word: lhc
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...