Con(CERN)? Na du!
The five-billion-quid Large Hadron Collider has been successfully switched on, in an attempt to peer back into the moment it all started.
Scientists have fired a beam of protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and among the fundamental questions in physics scientists hope to answer with the LHC, is what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang.
Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light. At various points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions, in the hope that new sub-atomic particles will emerge.
Including dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Brilliant.
Of course, there have been the usual panic stories - in particular from German chemist Professor Otto Rossler - that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".
As suggested above, project leader Welshman Lyn Evans does not agree.
As someone who is perpetually in awe of these mind-wrenching attempts to further our understanding of such complex mysteries, I wonder if the answer is anything like 42...
Scientists have fired a beam of protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and among the fundamental questions in physics scientists hope to answer with the LHC, is what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang.
Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light. At various points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions, in the hope that new sub-atomic particles will emerge.
Including dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Brilliant.
Of course, there have been the usual panic stories - in particular from German chemist Professor Otto Rossler - that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".
As suggested above, project leader Welshman Lyn Evans does not agree.
As someone who is perpetually in awe of these mind-wrenching attempts to further our understanding of such complex mysteries, I wonder if the answer is anything like 42...
posted by ROB at 11:26 am
1 Comments:
Wrong cultural touchstone, Rob. The (right) answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.
Any more of that and you'll have us all drowned in a bottomless pit of Higgs bosons!
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