Or so I am reliably informed by the CERN website. My inner particle physicist is excited by the imminent LCH start-up due on September 10. This is what 20 years of international cooperation has been working towards and I for one, am delighted that it is almost here.
From the CERN website:
"The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory.
Year 2008 marks the culmination of 20 years of work by physicists, engineers, technicians and support staff from over 80 different countries."
I've previously discussed the value of art, but this is about the value of scientific progress, something I find easier to accept and assign a higher value than old paintings. Not that I am in favour of all scientific progress as I think this is so often derailed by big business skewing research for their own ends (a blog for another day).
What makes this so thrilling is not just the actual potential for new understanding of particle physics. "It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe," says the website.
I first heard of CERN years ago, probably from a Horizon programme on the BBC. This sparked excitement as I am a frustrated physicist, and when I studied physics in the 70's little of this was accessible at the level to which I studied. No one had yet discovered the "particle zoo" or named the elementary particles quarks and leptons. Physicists suspected there was dark matter and theorised that at the Big Bang there was anti matter, but these were fairly new theories at that time. I was lucky enough to have physics tutors who had worked in the nuclear and chemical industries and shared their fascination with cutting edge science. Now at CERN four experiments will push forward the science, but I'll stop here with the explanations as a visit to the CERN website will give you everything you could want to know about particles.
Their education pages are terrific and you don't need an in depth knowledge of physics to learn enough to generate your own excitement about this (well, unless you really, really don't like science).
There is also some fun stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
2 comments:
News of quarks may not have reached your place of study, but I remember in the mid 70's, when I was in the sixth form, reading a Scientific American article on Quantum Chromodynamics.
I also recall quarks putting in a guest appearance in a physics lesson on Milikan's oil drop experiment. I've never seen any confirmation of this, but the physics teacher said that some of the results in Milikan's lab book, which were omitted from his publish work, corresponded to particles with a charge of one third of that on an electron - i.e. consistent with quarks.
A couple of years later, during my time at University, Hawkwind released the album Quark, Strangeness and Charm. This must have been not long after the discovery of the charm quark.
So in the 70's, although top and bottom were still theoretical, the idea of quarks seems to have been common currency.
Thanks for the comment Egytophile. I'll look up the Hawkwind album!
If you look at the coments under the Youtube link you'll find an unusal mix of science pendants, moaners about white women rapping and loud disappointment from those who arrived at the Hadron site through a misspelling of what they actually wanted.
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