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Do Not Fear the Large Hadron Collider
Hysteria, and particularly the act of promoting hysteria, ranks pretty high on my pet peeves list. As such, I have a distaste for FOX news. Here’s one such headline they offered up in January:
Scientists Not So Sure ‘Doomsday Machine’ Won’t Destroy World
Since knowledge immunizes fear, let’s take a closer look at understanding this machine; the Large Hadron Collider. The big picture goal of this machine is to understand more about the physical structure of particles the form the universe. They do this by re-creating conditions as seen shortly after the “big bang” that got this party started.
The LHC itself is a 27 kilometer loop, a racetrack of sorts, that is built underground near Geneva in Switzerland. It is a particle accelerator with the job of getting two particle beams going around this racetrack in opposite directions. These beams travel as close to the speed of light as possible (0.999999991) and finally the beams are crossed as the particle collisions are observed.
The energy of that collision is equivalent to a head-on crash of two Subaru cars traveling at 1712 kilometers per hour. Sounds like a wild Friday night at the CERN lab, but this is serious business. Many scientists share the LHC and run various experiments to test their own research projects, but on the top of CERN’s “most wanted” list is to prove existence of the Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs boson is the missing piece of the particle puzzle. Currently it is entirely theoretical. It fills a hole in the picture scientists have of the fundamental structure of all matter, and it is a significantly important gap. So important that it has been nicknamed “the God particle”.
Now bear with me as I attempt to summarize my own semi-understanding of this thing in a very brief fashion.
There are four fundamental forces in the universe. Electromagnetic force, the Strong nuclear force, the Weak nuclear force, and Gravity. In the 1970s it was proposed that the Electromagnetic and Weak forces are in fact two ends of the same stick, with only subtle differences. An attempt was made to unify them into one mathematical theory, but a hiccup prevented this. It would only work if the particles responsible for the force had no mass. Enter the Higgs boson.
It is proposed that a soup of these Higgs particles is all round us, in every corner of the cosmos. All other particles have zero mass, and it is only through interacting with the Higgs field that they can achieve mass. So one of the experiments at the LHC is to separate and identify this elusive Higgs particle, which would be a huge step forward in our understanding of “stuff” in the most general sense.
Being an immensely complex machine, the Large Hadron Collider has spent more time under maintainance and repair than actually in operation, but as these bugs get worked out we can expect some serious scientific progress. (which is probably what has FOX so riled up)
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