MANILA, Philippines?If you?re reading this, then the world didn?t end on Wednesday the 10th like many people were afraid it might.
That was the day the Large Hadron Collider, probably the biggest manmade machine ever designed to run physics experiments to study natural forces in a controlled environment, was supposed to be turned on for the very first time in spite of pleas, death threats and lawsuits.
The naysayers worried that when the LHC installed in a nearly 27 kilometer-long circular tunnel buried over 300 feet deep in the Alps between France and Switzerland was switched on, the Earth would be destroyed.
Study particle collisions
Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, to study particle collisions between members of the hadron family such as protons and neutrons moving at the speed of light in order to identify the basic components of each, the Collider?s large circumference raised fears that such impacts might open up microscopic black holes that could end the world as we know it.
Several days later, it?s clear that hasn?t happened.
Granted, turning on the Collider meant sending a single particle beam around the tunnel, instead of two beams circling each other from opposite directions to build up speed before actually running into each other through the guidance of several thousand magnets. An actual collision may not take place for several more weeks depending on the schedule at which the experiments planned are conducted.
But the status quo is good for the LHC Safety Assessment Group, who released an updated report on the potential hazards of using the machine last week in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics.
?Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth?and the planet still exists,? the report said.
Though CERN approved the multibillion-dollar project in 1994, construction on the Collider didn?t start for a few more years. Now that the LHC is finally operational, the international team of 7,000 scientists hopes it can help answer a few burning questions.
One such question involves finding out what the universe looked like one second after it was created by the explosive Big Bang. This experiment is what raised concerns about all the tiny black holes created as particles careened together in the LHC. But as the Safety Assessment Group noted in their report: ?Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists.?
Missing piece of puzzle
Another question scientists hope to answer via the LHC is whether or not the Higgs boson, theorized to be responsible for giving everything mass, actually exists. Also known as the God particle (though perhaps not for the same reasons the ivory-billed woodpecker is known as the Lord God Bird), the Higgs boson is the missing piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model used by many particle physicists to explain how particles and forces interact.
And still another question involves understanding dark matter and energy, the invisible portion of the universe that complements the estimated observable 4 percent. Researchers hope to be able to produce dark matter in the LHC, and hope to find particles that will prove the existence of something they can?t see.
Scientists have been impatiently waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to power up so that they can start looking for the answers to these and other questions. And now that the Collider is operational, perhaps the one question looming over everything else is whether or not the machine can live up to expectations of its performance.
E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.
