Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

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.

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