i just learned today that cern has built the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. its called the LHC or the Large Hardon Collider. with this new powerful tool, they can have protons travel upto 99.9999991% the speed of light. :) when protons collide at this high energies, new particles will form -- like anti matter. they are expecting/hoping to create the higgs bosson as suggested by the strings theory, that may lead to the validity of hidden dimensions.
this huge gadget in geneva is 27 kilometers in circumference. Protons can travel in the ring upto 11,000 revolutions per second. they have started operations last september 10. :) there hasn't been any major discoveries the theoretical physics for the last 30 years. this new gadget will hope to verify (or falsify) theories proposed about the birth of our universe.
although there are groups who are opposed of the lhc. they said it could destroy our earth, or even our solar system. there are theories that lhc can start a black hole that can eat up our whole solar system. but cern scientist disapproves of this because if there are any microscopic black holes that will be formed, it will i imaterialize instantaneously. i can't help imagine a movie like worst case scenario when some mad scientist tries to pull of a powerful and dangerous experiment. scary, but an exciting time for physics once again :)
Cla, Angels and Demons book mentions CERN. Not sure if it mentions the same device.
ReplyDeleteyes, i think lhc cas mentioned in the book. although it took them 20 years to build the device, cern only officially used the device last september 10. :)
ReplyDeletegoogled it..
Oddly, the elevator showed only two stops, GROUND LEVEL and LHC. "What's LHC stand for?" Langdon asked, trying not to sound nervous. "Large Hadron Collider," Kohler said. "A particle accelerator." (p.54)