The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), thsmashing machine built underneath the alps, has sent internet-based harbingers of doom into ae atom- spin.Mysteries of the Universe will be solved, starting next WednesdayLarge Hadron Collider will not turn world to goo, promise scientists
They say it won’t be four horsemen that spell the end of the world as we know it but the flick of a switch next Wednesday, when the Earth will be consumed from inside out and turned to a pile of grey goo. Doomsayers are so worried about the impending end of the universe that they have been to court to try to stop it.
But today their apocalyptic alarm bells were silenced by a report outlining just how safe it is to recreate the Big Bang somewhere in Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the atom-smashing machine built underneath the alps - has sent more internet-based harbingers of doom into a spin than it will have atomic particles whizzing around its 17-mile circumference when it is put into action next week.
They fear the energies released will be so powerful that a runaway black hole will be created that will engulf the planet, or produce “quantum strangelets” transforming the Earth into a dead lump of “strange matter”.
They say it won’t be four horsemen that spell the end of the world as we know it but the flick of a switch next Wednesday, when the Earth will be consumed from inside out and turned to a pile of grey goo. Doomsayers are so worried about the impending end of the universe that they have been to court to try to stop it.
But today their apocalyptic alarm bells were silenced by a report outlining just how safe it is to recreate the Big Bang somewhere in Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the atom-smashing machine built underneath the alps - has sent more internet-based harbingers of doom into a spin than it will have atomic particles whizzing around its 17-mile circumference when it is put into action next week.
They fear the energies released will be so powerful that a runaway black hole will be created that will engulf the planet, or produce “quantum strangelets” transforming the Earth into a dead lump of “strange matter”.
Walter L Wagner and Luis Sancho in Hawaii took their battle against the end of the world to court. They sought a temporary restraining order on scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, who they say have played down the chances that the collider could produce a tiny black hole, which could eat the Earth. They say CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The ‘end of the world is nigh’ suspicions have been so powerful that the scientists behind the LHC have
published a report to allay their fears and convince them that the world will carry on as normal, even after the biggest and most powerful atom collider ever built is turned on in Geneva.
“Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists,” the report says.
Just outside of Geneva, 300ft below the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC will blast atomic particles around its circumference approximately 11,200 times every second, before smashing them headlong into one another.
Scientists have been using particle collision devices similar to the LHC for 30 years without incident, but the concerns over this device have arisen because it is the biggest and most powerful machine of its type to have been built.
The report, published to quell panic, was written by five CERN physicists. They were told to review a safety assessment written by colleagues in 2003 that also gave the project the green light.
The LHC is to start unleashing a beam of protons in the first stage of its commissioning process on Wednesday. The process has been delayed by a week - not because of safety fears, but because it is the only date the BBC’s Andrew Marr is available to present the event live on Radio 4.
Two parallel beams of particles, pulsing around the underground ring in opposite directions will be bent by superconducting magnets at four points to cause them to collide. Detectors in the giant chamber will record the resulting sub-atomic debris.
This invisible rubble could help resolve some of the biggest questions in physics, such as the nature of mass, the weakness of gravity and whether, as some suggest, there exist dimensions beyond our own.
The new Safety Assessment Report, published by the Institute of Physics in London, says that any black holes produced by the collider would be “microscopic” and decay almost immediately, as they would lack the energy to grow or even be sustained.
“Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists,” it says.
As for the hypothesised “strangelets,” the report referred to data from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to say that these would not be produced by collisions in the LHC.
France has also asked a watchdog agency, the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), to carry out a safety appraisal of the LHC.
The European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, last month rejected a last-ditch legal bid to stop the LHC’s switch-on. The suit had been filed by a group of European citizens, led by a German biochemist, Otto Roessler, of the University of Tuebingen.
He had deduced it would be “quite plausible” to conclude that black holes resulting from the LHC experiment “will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside” across a devastating four-year period of decay.
But his views are very much in the minority, as Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor of the New Scientist, explains on her blog.
“Scale the cosmic ray sums up to cover the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe and you find that nature has already made the equivalent of 1031 LHCs. Or if you like, 10 trillion LHCs are running every second. And we're still here.”
Mysteries of the Universe will be solved, starting next Wednesday.
It is the most ambitious and expensive civilian science experiment in history, based on the biggest machine that humanity has yet built. It has sparked alarmist fears that it might create a black hole that will tear the Earth apart, and it has triggered two last-minute legal attempts to stop it. And next Wednesday, after almost two decades of planning and construction, the project in question will finally get under way.
Beneath the foothills of the Jura mountains, in a network of tunnels that bring to mind the lair of a crazed Bond villain, scientists will fire a first beam of particles around a ring as long as the Circle Line on the London Underground. This colossal circuit, 17 miles (27km) in circumference, is the world’s most powerful atom-smasher, the £3.5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), created at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Some 10,000 scientists and engineers from 85 countries have been involved. In the years ahead it will recreate the high-energy conditions that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang. In doing so, it should solve many of the most enduring mysteries of the Universe.
This extraordinary feat of engineering will accelerate two streams of protons to within 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light, so that they complete 11,245 17-mile laps in a single second. The two streams will collide, at four points, with the energy of two aircraft carriers sailing into each other at 11 knots, inside detectors so vast that one is housed in a cavern that could enclose the nave of Westminster Abbey. The detectors will trace the sub-atomic debris that is thrown off by the collisions, to reveal new particles and effects that may never have existed on Earth before.
The mountains of data produced will shed light on some of the toughest questions in physics. The origin of mass, the workings of gravity, the existence of extra dimensions and the nature of the 95 per cent of the Universe that cannot be seen will all be examined. Perhaps the biggest prize of all is the “God particle” – the Higgs boson. This was first proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs, of Edinburgh University, as an explanation for why matter has mass, and can thus coalesce to form stars, planets and people. Previous atom-smashers, however, have failed to find it, but because the LHC is so much more powerful, scientists are confident that it will succeed.
Even a failure, however, would be exciting, because that would pose new questions about the laws of nature.
“What we find honestly depends on what’s there,” said Brian Cox, of the University of Manchester, an investigator on one of the four detectors, named Atlas. “I don’t believe there’s ever been a machine like this, that’s guaranteed to deliver. We know it will discover exciting things. We just don’t know what they are yet.” The guarantee applies, however, only if the hardware works as it should, and the LHC’s first big test comes on Wednesday, when the first beam of particles is injected into the accelerator. That is a huge technical challenge. “The beam is 2mm in diameter and has to be threaded into a vacuum pipe the size of a 50p piece around a 27km loop,” said Lyn Evans, the LHC’s project manager, who will oversee the insertion. “It is not going to be trivial.”
Engineers will use magnets to bend the beam around the LHC’s eight sectors, until it finally begins to circulate. “That’ll be the first sight of relief, that there are no obstacles in the vacuum chamber,” Dr Evans said. “There could be a Kleenex in the chamber – we’ve had that before. Only when we get the beam around will we be able to tell it’s clear.”
Once the first beam is in – probably the one running clockwise, though that has yet to be decided – the team will insert the second, anticlockwise stream of particles. The first collisions, to test the detectors, should follow by the end of next week.
The next step will be to “capture” the beams so they fire in short pulses, 2,800 times a second. These will then be accelerated to an energy of 5 tera-electronvolts (TeV), generating collisions of 10TeV.The detectors should be calibrated by the end of the year and the collisions will then be ramped up to their maximum energy of 14TeV, generating the conditions that prevailed fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
One of the first scientific discoveries is likely to concern a theory called supersymmetry. Tejinder Virdee, of Imperial College, London, who leads the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector team, said: “What supersymmetry predicts is that, for every particle you have a partner, so it doubles up the spectrum. You have a whole new zoology of particles, if you like.”
Theory suggests that if supersymmetry is real, evidence to confirm it should emerge quickly from the LHC, possibly as soon as next year. “If it pops up it’ll be quite easy to see,” Professor Cox said.
Such a discovery might also help to explain dark matter, which is thought to account for much of the missing mass of the Universe. Only about 4 per cent of matter – galaxies and the like – is visible to our telescopes. “In this new zoology, the lightest super-symmetric particle is a prime candidate for explaining dark matter,” Professor Virdee said.
The search for the Higgs could take longer, though it depends on the particle’s mass and thus the energy of the collisions in which it might be found. If it is at the heavier end of the possible range, the discovery could take as little as 12 months. A lighter Higgs would take longer to find, as the particles into which it would decay would also be lighter and harder to track.
Other potential discoveries include evidence for the existence of extra dimensions beyond the familiar three of space and one of time, and the creation of miniature (and harmless) black holes, though these are less probable. “Most of us think we’d be very lucky to find these things,” Professor Cox said.
There are two more detectors. The LHCb will investigate why there is any matter in the Universe at all, while Alice aims to study a mixture known as quark-gluon plasma, which last existed in the first millionth of a second after the big bang.
