The Large Hadron Collider: A Neat Science Project Idea
Whether you are a doomsayer or a scientist, one thing that everyone can verify about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is that this is one massive project in every sense of the word. Take a look at some of the proportions of this particle accelerator:
It has cost €3 billion (£2.7billion/$USD4.7) to build
There are 7,000 scientists from 34 countries working on the project, employing about half of all the particle physicists in the world
The collider is made up of two concentric underground rings, with a circumference of 17 miles (27km)
The tunnels are underground on the border of Switzerland and France
It has taken 15 years to build
The purpose of the LHC is to answer some of the major questions in physics, such as why particles have mass; whether Higgs boson (the ‘God’ particle) exists, and whether it is possible to find black holes and magnetic monopoles.
To do this, the LHC will accelerate particles to 99.99999% the speed of light and smash them together, recreating the conditions which occurred just after the big bang. The result is that energy will be converted to mass – the converse scenario of an atomic bomb, in which mass is converted into energy. The fast moving particles combine to create much heavier, slower moving particles, within which the elusive Higgs particle is hypothesised to exist.
However, as is perhaps unavoidable given the science-fiction proportions of the project, more than just physics secrets are hypothesised to eventuate from LHC’s operations. Some doomsday theories currently circulating are that the LHC will create black holes into which the earth will be sucked; the creation of strangelets which would convert other matter into strangelets on touch; and, the creation of magnetic monopoles which would start a chain reaction converting atoms into other matter, and have formed the basis of a lawsuit against the US Department of Energy and others.
So what will be the result? Put forward your hypothesis here.
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Tags: CERN, large hadron collider
