The website of the Large Hadron Collider begins, "Our understanding of the universe is about to change ..." Maybe this was what the Stonehenge builders had in mind. The LHC as it is called, is 17 miles around and is buried underneath the border of France and Switzerland, not far from Geneva. (It was cheaper to tunnel underground than purchase all of the land above ground.)
Conceptually, the idea is that huge electromagnets will accelerate protons to speeds never before realized on earth. It has two opposing racetracks so that the protons are accelerated in opposite directions, such that when they collide, the collision will have effectively twice the speed. (Reminds me of a science experiment when my friend, Robin and I tried throwing rocks at each other, trying to have the rocks smash each other. My chin stopped Robin's rock.) But that's the idea - super-accelerate protons and watch what happens when they collide.
To add some intrigue, one of the things physicists hope come from the collisions is the so-called god-particle, otherwise known as the Higgs Boson. It has never been observed and its existence is still debated. This Higgs boson particle is theorized to create the Higgs field, which accounts for mass, or proportionately, weight. An atom has mass inside a Higgs field, but outside of it, would have none.
Last year, the Large Hadron Collider had just become operational when a fault between two superconducting magnets almost destroyed the magnet array. Since that time, CERN has experienced incredible difficulty in getting the world's largest science experiment working again. Some people have wondered why it has taken so long.
Probably you have seen science fiction movies where a plot thread involved a time travel paradox. Is the large hadron collider killing its own grandfather? speculates that the Higgs boson is traveling back in time to prevent its creation. Two physicists have even written a paper to test whether this hypothesis is correct.
Mmm.
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