On Wednesday, CERN will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive underground laboratory that will smash protons together and analyse the sub-atomic debris that results. What's CERN, you ask? It's the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the photo above is where they'll be sending a beam flying in one direction on Wednesday the 10th, then a few days later they'll circulate a beam in the other direction, and about six weeks from now they'll send beams in both directions so they can collide. The first high-energy collisions are to take place on October 21st. Recently the physicists have been cooling down the circular tunnel (pictured above), which is 27 km in circumference and is located 100 metres underground near Geneva, Switzerland.Believe it or not, the best way for many of us to begin to understand what they are doing is by watching a YouTube video called Large Hadron Rap, which has had 1,256,540 hits in the countdown to this week's startup of the world's greatest atom-smasher. Oh, by the way, some folks think what they're doing may create a black hole that could ... ummm ... suck us all into it. Into the black hole, that is. So how much do YOU know about matter and anti-matter?
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Read more:
Scientists start world's largest particle collider
CERN
The U.S. at the LHC
Large Hadron Rap, which has had 1,759,033 hits as of September 10, 2008.
Oh, my, the Large Hadron Rap has had 3,979,609 hits as of December 3, 2008!
And on December 13, 2009, the Large Hadron Rap has had 5,492,617 views.
Now it's March 30,2010 and the Large Hadron Rap has been viewed 5,688,524 times.
As of May 10, 2018, the Large Hadron Rap has been viewed 8, 037, 662 times.
1 comment:
The folks at CERN are about to try again, a year later. But this time there's a notion floating around "that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
Say what? Check out this idea, here:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=749E0920BCC08DE2919846CAE88EF152.w5?a=455373&single=1&f=25=
In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson [Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen] said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."
One more thing -- as of today the Large Hadron Rap has had 5,344,840 views.
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