CERN to Probe Life, the Universe and Everything

[suffer for joy]

SOURCE

CERN to Probe Life, the Universe and Everything
By Richard Waddington

GENEVA (Reuters) - It has revolutionized physics, made Nobel Prize winners and given birth to the World Wide Web -- now its successor looks set to answer some of the natural world's most fundamental questions.

CERN (news - web sites), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has made many formidable discoveries since its launch 50 years ago, but these achievements could be dwarfed by findings from a 17-mile accelerator, or particle-smasher, being assembled outside Geneva.

From 2007 it will be firing particles at speeds nearing that of light, before smashing them together to re-create the conditions scientists believe existed less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang -- the birth of the cosmos some 14 billion years ago.

"(We) have achieved very, very important results in what we call particle physics, which is to say, what happened after the Big Bang," said CERN Director-General Robert Aymar.

"Right now we have too many theories and this is the machine to confirm, or not, the models that we have. Only experiment can help us make the choice," he told Reuters.

The new accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), replaces another, the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), which was the world's largest and Europe's biggest civil engineering undertaking until the Channel Tunnel was built.

The statistics of the new venture are mind-boggling. The temperatures created in the particle collisions will be around one billion times that of the center of the Sun.

Ever since Sir Isaac Newton, scientists have known that gravity acts on mass, but what they still do not know is where the particles get their mass from.

....

Someone smart explain what all this means.

sfj

[George Murphy]

SOURCE

CERN to Probe Life, the Universe and Everything
By Richard Waddington

GENEVA (Reuters) - It has revolutionized physics, made Nobel Prize winners and given birth to the World Wide Web -- now its successor looks set to answer some of the natural world's most fundamental questions.

CERN (news - web sites), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has made many formidable discoveries since its launch 50 years ago, but these achievements could be dwarfed by findings from a 17-mile accelerator, or particle-smasher, being assembled outside Geneva.

From 2007 it will be firing particles at speeds nearing that of light, before smashing them together to re-create the conditions scientists believe existed less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang -- the birth of the cosmos some 14 billion years ago.

"(We) have achieved very, very important results in what we call particle physics, which is to say, what happened after the Big Bang," said CERN Director-General Robert Aymar.

"Right now we have too many theories and this is the machine to confirm, or not, the models that we have. Only experiment can help us make the choice," he told Reuters.

The new accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), replaces another, the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), which was the world's largest and Europe's biggest civil engineering undertaking until the Channel Tunnel was built.

The statistics of the new venture are mind-boggling. The temperatures created in the particle collisions will be around one billion times that of the center of the Sun.

Ever since Sir Isaac Newton, scientists have known that gravity acts on mass, but what they still do not know is where the particles get their mass from.

....

Someone smart explain what all this means.

sfj

It isn't at all clear from this news item that there's anything qualitatively new about what CERN is planning to do, though the energies may be higher than in previous experiments. For the past ~70 years physicists have been smashing particles together at higher and higher energies. (& no matter how high the energy, the speeds will always be a teeny bit less than that of light.)

But I don't mean to make this work sound unimportant. As we get to higher and higher energies, we can approximate conditions earlier and earlier in the big bang and try to get a better understanding of what might have gone on then. In particular, we can try to find out how different kinds of elementary particles came into being. What this means theologically (IMO) is that we can find out something about the processes by which God created matter.

The last sentence in the report is a bit cryptic. Mass gives rise to gravitational fields and is in turn acted on them, but we don't know why some particles have rest mass. (Some particles - in particular, light quanta - don't, though they have energy.) So one of the problems is to understand how mass - in that sense - originates.

I don't know if I clarified things adequately here. Please let me know if you have more specific questions. (My physics background is not in elementary particles so no guarantees on being able to answer all questions in that area!)

Shalom,
George

[Xavier]

I'm working on a Distrubuted computing prog for the LHC...

[bigsplit]

It seems like I have heard they are looking for Higg's boson or the "God Particle."

[Sparko]

They will probably create quantum black holes and let them escape into the center of the earth where they will suck everything into oblivion unless we can stop them with a time machine.

Oh wait, that was a sci fi book I read once. I think it was Thrice Upon a Time, by James P. Hogan. cool book.

[flipper]

They will probably create quantum black holes and let them escape into the center of the earth where they will suck everything into oblivion unless we can stop them with a time machine.

Oh wait, that was a sci fi book I read once. I think it was Thrice Upon a Time, by James P. Hogan. cool book.

Well, what's the point of meddling with forces you don't understand if you can't destroy the world?

[Sparko]

Well, what's the point of meddling with forces you don't understand if you can't destroy the world?

True, true. And it makes for a good mini-series if we survive.