It was a pleasure…

Date: Sep 07, 2008 | Author: Santiago B. | Categories: Science and Tech

In exactly 72 hours a group of scientists from many different countries will turn on the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever built by men. It is the longest: it has a 27 kilometers long tunnel between 50 and 175 meters underground and crosses the frontier between France and Switzerland. It is also the most powerful: using over 1,600 magnets that weigh around 27 tons each, it keeps two proton beams moving in circles at 99.99% of the speed of light and then make them collide. Before being launched, the protons are “charged” in linear accelerators and in the Proton Synchrotron Booster. To operate it needs to be at a temperature of 1.9°K (-271°C).

When the collisions take place, the local temperature will raise to be 100,000 hotter than the Sun’s core.

What is all this for, you may be asking. Among other things, to discover why particles have mass, to know what dark matter is and where it is, to find antimatter and get as close as possible to the conditions in which the Big Bang took place (it will recreate the situation one billionth of a second after it).

And why is the title of the post a farewell message? Well, because one of the expected developments after the collisions is to generate as a result tiny Black Holes and “strangelets”, which should in turn vanish after just a few microseconds. And even while the majority of the scientific community considers there is no risk, many others say there is a small chance that something could go wrong and then destroy…the entire Solar System.

In fact, two well respected scientists in the US even filed a lawsuit asking a Judge to prevent the LHC from being turned on to protect life on Earth.

Even if the chance is small, I did not want to be left afterwards with the remorse of not having said good bye. So just in case… It was a pleasure!