Word: lhc
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...reading this, the world didn't end last Wednesday morning--but then, no serious person thought it would. Two men with more of a cause than a clue, however, had sued to stop the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator near Geneva, from being switched on, arguing that it could lead to black holes or other scary things that could destroy the earth...
...weight of scientific evidence was overwhelmingly against the men, so the lawsuit didn't go ahead, and at 4:30 a.m. E.T. that day, the start-up of the LHC did. A beam of protons was sent whirling around a ring-shaped tunnel some 300 ft. underground and nearly 17 miles around, making the circuit in approximately 1/10,000 of a second...
...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...
...moment, scientists call these unknowns "dark energy" and "dark matter," respectively. The LHC, by examining the subatomic building blocks of the universe, might explain these mysteries and many others, much as a doctor diagnoses a patient by studying blood work. But according to Tejinder Virdee, a particle physicist from Imperial College London, the best-case scenario will be if the machine uncovers something completely unexpected. "Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us," he said. "You can make conjectures, but unless you verify the conjectures, they are metaphysics. That's why many...