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August 08, 2008
Knocking the hell out of particles
They’re about to switch on the Large Hadron Collider, over there under the Swiss-French border. Which, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a long [27 km] underground tunnel containing a clever tube with a natty arrangement of magnets that can accelerate particles, in opposite directions, to such speeds that all sorts of tricky things occur when they collide.
a bit of the tunnel [with two engineers looking for all the world like they've just missed the last Circle Line train to Hammersmith]
another bit of the underground shenanigans, note the man centre foreground - just to give you an idea of the size of some of this stuff.
Now certain people, at the back of the class, are concerned that, when the LHC gets up to speed and the good people at CERN start slamming particles into each other, they'll create a Black Hole that will proceed, with astonishing speed, to swallow the earth and all of creation. Indeed the word “instantaneous” is being banded about, which is fine - if that's the case then we won’t be around long enough to see who was right.
Sean Carroll has put together a list of the sort of things that might, and indeed might not, happen when the Big Switch is thrown. He puts the chance of creating a Black Hole at 10-25%. He puts the chance of discovering God slightly higher at 10-20%.
Most of the clever money seems to be on finding Higgs’ Bosun.
Lots of good pictures here.
Posted by john at August 8, 2008 05:24 PM