Why The World Is Not About To Blow Up
CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, located in Switzerland. Its task is to find out more about the very thing that everything is made from – matter. We know that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. In turn, these particles are thought to be made up from other, smaller, very hard to detect particles.
The Large Hadron Collider is a giant physics experiment, costing around $10 billion AUD ($8 billion USD). The LHC is built in a tunnel 100m below the surface on the border of Switzerland and France. The main tunnel is circular, with a circumference of 27km. It has taken about 20 years to build.
At 9.15pm on Wednesday, 10th September 2008, in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider was turned on for the first time. A beam of protons (the positive particles found in the nucleus of atoms) was directed around the main tunnel in a beam with a width about that of a human hair. The protons were “steered” by extremely powerful magnets made from coils cooled to -271oC (-455.8oF) or only a few degrees above absolute zero. The protons in the beam are given a push and each time the protons go around the ring, they get faster – finally reaching very close to the speed of light (99.999999% the speed of light, or about 300,000km per second).
Even though protons have a mass of 0.00000000000000000000000000167 kg each, the clump of protons going around the LHC have the same energy as a speeding cargo train – if they go off course they would blow a very big hole in very expensive physics equipment.
Hours later, another beam of protons was accelerated around the ring in the opposite direction. Further down the track – perhaps weeks away, the CERN physicists will direct two clumps of these super-fast protons moving in opposite directions into each other in a head-on collision. The protons will be ripped apart (imagine smashing two billiard balls into each other at high speed). The little pieces produced in the collision will be fed into several giant detectors.
One particle the scientists are looking for is called the Higgs boson – the particle believed to give everything mass. It is possible that as a result of the collision between protons, tiny “black holes” will be produced, where matter as we know it has been squashed into a tiny volume.
However, such black holes could not grow into larger holes. They would evaporate very soon after forming. Some misinformed sections of the media have been making a nice “shock-horror” story out of these mysterious black holes, publicising the fear of some pseudo-scientists that any black hole would simply consume the Earth – gobbling us up never to be seen again. The fact is that many millions of these collisions occur above our heads in the upper atmosphere every day when particles from deep outer space slam into the air particles.
The Large Hadron Collider experiments are expected to continue for 20 years or so. If the Higgs boson is not found, scientists will have to go back to square one and come up with another theory for matter.
