Word: lhc
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It’s rare for physics to make the news, but somehow the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator run by the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border, became a bona-fide celebrity. There hasn’t been a tube this famous since the London subway. The collider’s renown is likely because most of the news about it has been bizarre: The Wall Street Journal ran an article about physicists there studying with a comedy coach to help them think creatively. A rap about the collider reached three million views on YouTube. Rumors...
...Hopes for LHC seem a little high, especially given that the collider will probably remain powered down until April due to a recent malfunction. But what hasn’t been in the news is that LHC comes 15 years too late and on the wrong continent. A potentially more powerful collider, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), was being constructed in Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1990s, but after much debate, Congress cut its funding in 1993 and had workers dismantle its 14 miles of underground tunneling. Without money, the project quickly collapsed. The official website is still frozen in time...
...LHC will help us probe what the universe was like just moments after the Big Bang. It might explain why more than 95 percent of the stuff out there is actually invisible. And it could lead to technological breakthroughs years from now. Plus, with all the low hanging fruit in physics already picked, scientists need expensive technology to continue delving into the secrets of the universe. Clocks, pendulums, and oil drops just don’t cut it in the 21st century...
...sheer size of the LHC - watching scientists work on its gargantuan components brings to mind a colony of frantic Lilliputians - and the complexity of the science behind it have resulted in bouts of eschatological fear of its destructive potential, with websites and even two lawsuits claiming the LHC will create black holes that will swallow up the earth. (The cover images of this week's issues of the Economist and TIME would suggest that black-hole anxiety has in fact bubbled up into the public consciousness.) But while such scenarios have been ruled out, the machine does pose a small...
Gillies says last week's functional hiccup was not surprising. A massive machine designed to study miniscule particles will inevitably face problems. The LHC's intricacy is indeed breathtaking: One of the particle detectors on the 17-mile ring (there are four) is connected to enough cable and wiring to wrap around the earth nearly seven times. Scientists had to take into account the gravitational pull of the tides when constructing...