Historic day as Europe’s underground nuclear lab recreates Big Bang
MAtthew Vella At 9am this morning, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, CERN – the one visited by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi back in January – will switch on its awe-inspiring Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to herald what is being described as a new age of discovery.
History will be made when after 20 years of work by 10,000 scientists, the LHC will be switched on to produce enough energy to recreate the conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang.
It’s called the hunt for God’s particle, or ‘Higgs boson’ as termed by physicists, the particle that is key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.
At full blast, the LHC today will fire two beams of particles in opposite directions around a 27km ring at 99.9% of the speed of light. That means the beams will be doing 11,245 laps of the machine every second.
At four points around the ring, the beams will collide into each other head-on.
As they slam into each other, they will be recreating the unimaginable energy that happened just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
The machine has been described as a “once in a generation kind of machine” – but while nobody knows exactly what will be discovered, scientists say today's experiments will be answering many important questions.
Scientists are expected to wait for some months as they try and understand what will be taking place. The experiment will be the first step in understanding what “dark matter” is: only 5% of the universe is made of matter while 25% is so-called “dark matter”, which clusters around galaxies, and the remaining 70% is the enigmatic “dark energy”, a mysterious antigravity force that is thought to pervade the universe.
One claim is that the experiment could prove supersymmetry: a theory that claims every particle in the universe has a larger but invisible twin, such as the neutralino.
To quote Stephen Hawking, the machine can reveal the “mind of God”, or the fundamental laws that underlie the workings of the universe, 95% of which is unknown.
Armageddon at hand?
But this unprecedented giant step for mankind has prompted sceptics like scientist Otto Rössler from the University of Tübingen, to file lawsuits in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project, fearing the experiment may create quasars – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes.
In simple terms, the alarmists claim the quasars will gobble the world up.
Rössler says it is “quite plausible” that “mini black holes” created at CERN will grow to eat the world up. But the courts rejected his claim, with CERN saying the chances of creating the black holes are miniscule.
“Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it. A few weeks later, we will see a similar beam of particles coming out of the soil on the other side of the planet. Then we will know there is a little quasar inside the planet,” Rössler has claimed, saying earthquakes and tsunamis would occur as the black holes form, predicting “a Biblical Armageddon”.
And in America, Dr Walter Wagner, who filed the suit in Hawaii, claims the experiments will create a “strangelet” that could ultimately turn the Earth into a supernova, or an exploding star.
Scientists at CERN’s Geneva lab have even received death threats by phone and emails from people who fear the world will end today.
The Maltese scientist at CERN, Dr Nicholas Sammut, says it is difficult to foresee what will happen on the day. “If all the settings are perfect, the beam will circulate the machine immediately. If the settings need some tweaking then it will take a few hours or even days until we reach this milestone. I think we will all be a little bit anxious on the day. I will probably be reciting a silent prayer as well.”
Sammut said the atmosphere at CERN has been great in anticipation of the experiment. “At CERN I am in direct contact with the best scientists in the world and I am actually working hands-on on the largest and most powerful instrument mankind has ever built. I consider it to be a real privilege to be here and I feel proud to be Maltese and hold our flag high amongst the representatives from the other 85 countries that collaborate with CERN.”
CERN says that nature’s own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC.
The LHC Safety Assessment Group reviewed their 2003 study, denying fears of black holes that will eat up the world. They say that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the earth, we would never have been given the chance to worry about the LHC, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth.
“Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists… Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists.”
They also say that such microscopic black holes cannot grow dangerously.
Malta signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva (CERN) to involve Maltese in CERN research and innovation projects.
Nicholas Sammut is currently a research engineer at CERN responsible for the implementation and optimisation of the feed forward control system of the LHC.
Sammut attained this prestigious position thanks to his research that was the fruit of a temporary collaboration agreement he personally set up between CERN and the Department of Microelectronics at the University of Malta. The collaboration gave Sammut access to the €25 million cryogenic infrastructure which he needed to successfully complete his research project.
He has also coordinated a team of engineers and technicians to build and characterise an electronic instrument that measures dynamic properties of LHC superconducting magnets. At the time of completion, this instrument was the fastest and most precise of its kind in the world.
What does the Large Hadron Collider do?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things.
In simple terms, the LHC will be recording what happens when protons – which are about a tenth of a thousandth as wide as an atom (and too small to see) – are smashed together.
In 1932, Cambridge experimenters John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atom by firing protons into the core of lithium atoms, producing atoms of a different type, helium. They had turned one chemical into another.
The LHC is basically going to shoot hundreds of billions of protons at 10 million times the energy first used back in 1932, at practically the speed of light. An LHC beam has the total energy of a 400-tonne train travelling at 150kph. Each proton has about the energy of motion of a flea.
The particle beams in the collider circulate in a tunnel 17 miles long. The collisions take place in four huge detectors. Around 10,000 physicists and engineers from 100 countries have worked on the €6.2 machine.
Inside the tunnel –a fridge that is colder than outer space (-240 degrees Celcius) the protons will be fired from opposite ends to collide against each other. 40 million collisions will occur every second.
The conditions then will be just as they were 13.7 billion years ago, at the start of the Big Bang.
By early next year, it is believed scientists will be unravelling new important information about physics’ Standard Model. Scientists hope to improve upon this model by proving the existence of supersymmetry or proof that supports string theory – which claims the universe is made up of vibrating pieces of string each a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre; and not of tiny, point-like particles.
Other questions the experiments will seek to answer are: the origin of mass, what 95% of the galaxy is actually made of, what the Big Bang was like, and whether additional spatial dimensions exist.
Back to the future?
When the LHC is fired up, it is believed the machine will also herald a new age of scientific research into time travel – an idea first mooted by Albert Einstein’s colleague Kurt Gödel.
Scientists predict that the LHC can distort spacetime – the blend of space and time that makes up the fabric of the universe – enough to make time loop back on itself allowing to go back to the past, something dreamt of by H.G. Wells before Einstein’s time.
Russian scientists at CERN say the LHC can create “wormholes” – tunnels through spacetime – that would allow time travel, as a result of the collision of particles.
Physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines the very concept of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.
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