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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider, the world's new and largest particle
collider, passed its first major tests by firing two beams of
protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile underground ring
Wednesday.
Scientists hope it's the next great step to understanding the
makeup of the universe.
After a few trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer
screen near Geneva, Switzerland, at 10:26 a.m. (4:26 a.m. EDT)
indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full
length of the $3.8 billion collider — described as the biggest
physics experiment in history.
"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam
completed its lap.
Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Fermilab in
Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the
proceedings by satellite.
Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam
counterclockwise.
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Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash
the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their
structure.
"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of
the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the
assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the
Swiss-French border.
The organization, informally known by its former French acronym
CERN, began firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle —
around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with the
first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (3:35 a.m. EDT).
"The beam is the size of a human hair," said CERN spokeswoman
Paola Catapano.
Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time in opposite
directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second
after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive
explosion that created the universe.
"My first thought was relief," said Evans, a Welshman who has
been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a
machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time.
But this morning has been a great start."
He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected
scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their
experiments "within a few months."
The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the
speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the
tunnel.
Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through
two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum
that is colder and emptier than outer space.
The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will
collide.
The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated
slightly in the morning's first test, leading to a pause to recool
them before trying the opposite direction.
The collider's two largest detectors — essentially huge digital
cameras weighing thousands of tons — are capable of taking millions
of snapshots a second.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter,"
antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.
It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the
Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because
it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to
matter that makes up the universe.
Previously unknown particles are also expected to pop up, if
only for a millionth of a second, from the high-energy collisions
of protons and antiprotons.
A pair of Russian scientists even think the LHC would be the
world's first time machine, and that we should expect
visitors from the future to arrive soon after it goes into
operation.
The start of the collider came over the objections of some who
feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth
by creating micro-black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed
stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other
stars.
"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for
CERN.
CERN was backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen
Hawking , who declared the experiments to be absolutely safe.
Brian Cox, a glamorous particle physicist at the University of
Manchester in England who literally was once a rock star,
told London's Daily Telegraph that he and his colleagues had
been receiving death threats.
He bluntly characterized anyone who feared the LHC would destroy
the world with an unprintable term for a female body part.
That hasn't stopped several people, including a former nuclear
engineer from Hawaii and a German biochemist, from speaking out
against the project.
"Someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean
during the night and no one will be able to explain it, retired
Professor Otto Roessler
told London's Mail on Sunday. "Very soon the whole planet will
be eaten in a magnificent scenario — if you could watch it from the
moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it
says in the Bible."
"[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly
light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a
miniature version of a giant black hole," reads
a lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Honolulu by
Walter L. Wagner and a Spanish colleague, Luis Sancho.
The case, in which Wagner and Sancho demand that the LHC stop
operations until an independent safety review is conducted, is
still pending.
Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could
happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control,
and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into
the rock around the tunnel.
Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though the accelerator
is still probably a year away from full power.
The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN
has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the
United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million.
Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.
Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the
LHC.
The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking
advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment.
The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two
years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher
than originally budgeted in 1996, Luciano Maiani, who was CERN
director-general at the time, told The Associated Press.
Maiani and the other three living former directors-general
attended the launch Wednesday.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup
of the atom.
Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons
were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages
since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller
quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and
particles.
FOXNews' Paul Wagenseil and The Associated Press contributed
to this report.
