How do you build a "Big Bang Machine"? That was the challenge which scientists at Cern began to ponder in the early 1980s, when the idea for the Large Hadron Collider was born. Cern's governing council wanted to build a kind of time machine that could open a window to how the Universe appeared in the first microseconds of its existence. If it could recreate the fleeting moments 13.73 billion years ago, when the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos took shape, then the world we live in today would be brought into much sharper focus.It could discover how matter prevailed over antimatter, learn how dark matter was formed, and catch our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson - a "missing jigsaw piece" in our model of the universe. We might even find evidence of the existence of other dimensions. But to conjure up these conditions, the Cern council new it needed to perform an engineering miracle.

To generate the necessary high energies, the designers required a particle accelerator more magnificently complex than any machine ever built. Beams of protons would be hurled together at 99.9999999% of the speed of light, in conditions colder than the space between the stars and each travelling with as much energy as a car at the speed of 1,600km/h. And yet the fruits of these explosions - high-energy particles - would decay and disappear from view in less than a trillionth of a second. To "photograph" these valuable prizes would require a detector as large as a five storey building, yet so precise, it could pinpoint a particle with an accuracy of 15 microns - 20 times thinner than a human hair. How on earth do you build a machine like that? The journey took 14 years, more than 10,000 scientists, from 40 countries, and a financial injection anticipated at up to 6.2bn euros - four times the original budget. But it was achieved, on time. Well, almost.

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 on 8-11 August 2008, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21 October 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 particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including supersymmetric particles, compositeness (technicolor), extra dimensions,strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles. Although a few individuals have questioned the safety of the planned experiments in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat.

Beauty Is Truth

Michio Kaku 10.07.08, 11:38 AM ET (In Forbes)

The media got it all wrong. It seized on the silly idea that the Large Hadron Collider would destroy the world. But the Nobel Prize committee got it right, awarding the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to two Japanese physicists and one Japanese-American physicist who helped to lay the foundation of the Standard Model of particles. That's the theory being tested by that very same instrument, which smashes atoms against each other. Ultimately, their work may answer some of the deepest questions about the universe and genesis itself. The real story concerns the search for beauty and simplicity in physics, the idea that guided Einstein for most of his life. Physicists think that nature, at its most basic level, must be fundamentally gorgeous. At the instant of the Big Bang, they believe, all the forces of the universe were unified into a coherent whole--into a single, mysterious, beautiful superforce. So beauty may ultimately reveal the true secret of creation. To a physicist, however, beauty is not some squishy, touchy-feely, ephemeral concept. Beauty to a physicist means symmetry, which can be reduced to precise mathematical equations, whether it's the symmetry of a snowflake or starfish, the beauty of a blazing star, the radiance of a diamond or the patterns of sub-atomic particles. Here's the rub. At the atomic level, everywhere we look, we see only shattered fragments of this master symmetry. Physicists were shocked to discover a whole zoo of sub-atomic particles in their atom smashers. (The father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was so frustrated by this deluge of particles that he solemnly proclaimed that the Nobel Prize should go to the physicist who had NOT discovered a new particle that year.) Light, gravity and nuclear forces seem totally dissimilar. So physicists are like detectives, trying to arrange the shattered pieces together, hunting for clues, trying to recreate the scene of the "crime," for example, the Big Bang. At the University of Chicago in the 1960s, Yoichio Nambu pioneered a radical idea--that the symmetry of a beautiful theory could be subtly broken. Think of a dam. From a distance, it looks beautiful, calm and elegant. But appearances are deceptive. The dam is actually unstable. If a tiny crack forms, it may burst, and the water may suddenly rush down to the state of lowest energy, that is, to sea level. Similarly, Nambu showed that even if a theory appears symmetrical, it could actually be unstable if a lower energy state exists in which that symmetry is broken. Perhaps, he said, our infant universe was originally symmetrical but was also unstable. Suddenly, this symmetry broke, and the universe burst into a lower energy state, unleashing a tidal wave of energy. This could be the origin of the Big Bang. (In physics, we have a saying. To understand the physics of the next 10 years, simply have a conversation with Professor Nambu.) Similarly, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa applied the ideas of symmetry to the theory of quarks, which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, themselves the building blocks of atoms. Much to their surprise, in 1973, they found that the quark model could be formulated in a more balanced, elegant fashion if there were three generations of quarks instead of two. Sure enough, in 1976 the next generation of quarks was found in our atom smashers. The work of Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa helped to lay the foundation of the Standard Model, often called the "theory of almost everything." It can unify everything except gravity. And there may even be a theory beyond the Standard Model, a true theory of everything that can unify all forces. It's called string theory. Not surprisingly, one of the founders of string theory is Professor Nambu, a newly minted Nobel Laureate who has years of research ahead of him. The best is yet to come.

Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York.

( 2 Votes, Average: 5.00 out of 5 )