Some may argue against spending money on Big ScienceTM, but I believe this is the kind of thing that defines a civilization. The ability to look beyond oneself and seek answers to the fundamental questions of the universe is what separates us from animals.
The largest superconducting magnet ever built has successfully been powered up to its operating conditions at the first attempt. Called the Barrel Toroid because of its shape, this magnet is a vital part of ATLAS, one of the major particle detectors being prepared to take data at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator scheduled to turn on in November 2007.
Massive as the magnet is, it is only a subsystem in the huge project that is the Large Hadron Collider:
The elevator buttons in front of me, hand-labeled in black marker, speak volumes: “Sky,” says one, the other, “Hell.”
Sky is the Swiss-French border, pastoral Geneva countryside in the shadow of soaring Alpine mountains. Hell is “The Machine” — a 16.8-mile underground ring where, in almost precisely a year, superconducting magnets will begin accelerating atomic particles to within a hairsbreadth of the speed of light, and smash them into each other.
The Machine is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, perhaps the most ambitious physics experiment ever created. If all goes well with its November 2007 launch, the LHC will help answer some of scientists’ most fundamental outstanding questions…
I love this stuff.
Yeah, that’s a mighty instrument!
There are also magnetic fields on the Sun.
Yup, this kind of thing is cool beyond cool.
I just hope I don’t wake up and find myself dead one morning coz these guys have punched a hole in the universe or something to see what would happen.
3,
But imagine the light show while you watch the universe get sucked into the hole (until you get sucked in too)!
Would stuff get all bendy as it goes in like in the movies?
… and caused the airplane to break-up in flight and the survivors found themselves on an island they thought was uninhabited.
#3 – Read “Thrice Upon a Time” by James Hogan. Starts with just that sort of problem – run an experiment that fills the Earth’s core with a bunch of microscopic black holes.
For the posters 3,4,5,6… There are different types of accelerators. One that was canceled in USA few years ago (“SSC”, Texas) aimed for collisions of the type/energies that could cause fears as you have. No more such accelerators are in construction/plans as the research interests have moved in another direction and the construction costs/requirements are quite unaffordable… LHC (and existing RHIC in Brookhaven, NY, USA) aim not to crash single particles (ex. hit one egg with another) but large collections of them (ex. collide truck-loads of eggs with each other). Such collisions will not reach concentrations some theoretisized could “poke the hole” in our Universe but do allow us to see “plasma” of individual quarks and such. LHC is improvement vs. RHIC, but if enthused about LHC, do check bnl.gov about the RHIC and its science… Same type of research, just already functioning for a decade…
I don’t know about the others, but I’m joking.