Top
Advertisement

THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER IS IT WORTH THE RISK

What do you guys think about this potentially harmful science experiment, here is an article on it.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

The collider is currently undergoing commissioning while being cooled down to its final operating temperature of approximately 1.9 K (−271.25 °C). Initial particle beam injections were successfully carried out between 8-11th August 2008, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for September 10, 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on October 21, 2008.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.

Concerns have been raised about the safety of the LHC on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the collider might cause disastrous events, including the production of stable micro black holes (mBHs) and strangelets. Several CERN-commissioned reports and subsequently published research papers have corroborated the safety of the LHC particle collisions. One research paper published on August 10, 2008 reaches the opposite conclusion, stating that "at the present stage of knowledge there is a definite risk from mBHs production at colliders." This researcher also suggests several steps that might reduce this risk

 

5
Ratings
  • 1,920 Views
  • 10 Comments
  • 0 Favorites
  • Flag
  • Flip
  • Pin It

10 Comments

  • Advertisement