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Protons, decades of work collide in successful test creating worldwide buzz
By Dennis Overbye
New York Times
Published on Thursday, Sep 11, 2008
BATAVIA, ILL. Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of champagne into the future on Wednesday.
After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.
At 4:28 a.m. EDT, the scientists announced that a beam of protons had completed its first circuit around the collider's 17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border. They then sent the beam around three more times.
''It's a fantastic moment,'' said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception in 1994. ''We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.''
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, re-creating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
An ocean away from Geneva, the new collider's activation was watched with rueful excitement at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which has had the reigning particle collider.
Several dozen physicists, students, onlookers and three local mayors gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new high-energy physics. They applauded
each milestone as the scientists methodically steered the protons on their course at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Many of them, including the lab's director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even night caps bearing Fermilab ''pajama party'' patches on them.
Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe is beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.
Frenzy of speculation
Oddone, who earlier in the day admitted it was a ''bittersweet moment,'' lauded the new machine as the result of ''two and a half decades of dreams to open up this huge new territory in the exploration of the natural world.''
Roger Aymar, CERN's director, called the new collider a ''discovery machine.'' The buzz was worldwide. On the blog ''Cosmic Variance,'' Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan called the new collider ''a why machine.''
Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, had called it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who could point to a variety of studies and reports that said that this fear was nothing but science fiction.
But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz about particle physics. ''This is something that people can talk to their neighbors about,'' he said.
The only thing physicists agree on is that they don't know what will happen — what laws and particles will prevail — when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.
Future discoveries
Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.
But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider were a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine that will now warm up for a couple of months before anyone drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.
Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on all those gathered at the Illinois lab.
Once upon a time, the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab's Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, anti-protons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts apiece, was the world's largest particle machine.
By year end, when the CERN collider has revved up to 5 trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time toward the Big Bang.
In 1993, the U.S. Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion.
CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countries with a stable budget established by treaty. The year after the U.S. supercollider was killed, CERN decided to build its own collider.
Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531 million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Oddone said Americans make up about a quarter of the scientists who built the CERN collider.
BATAVIA, ILL. Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of champagne into the future on Wednesday.
Get the full article here.
Comments
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Vatican , It
Posted 12:45 PM, 09/11/2008
You're batting zero here, Bruce...
