Posted on 06/04/2003 6:45:04 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
GENEVA (Reuters) - Europe's top particle physics research center has taken a major step in its plan to build the world's biggest "particle smasher" which it hopes will eventually unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe.
On Wednesday it inaugurated a huge bottle-shaped vault which will house Atlas, an enormous detector of the micro-items of matter that make up life, the universe and everything.
Atlas, standing as high as a four-story building and twice as long, will almost fill the cavern, cut into rock beneath meadowland straddling the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.
The giant piece of machinery will form a central part of a "how things began" program at the multi-nation center -- CERN (news - web sites), the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The completed particle accelerator, which is due to start up in 2007, aims to recreate the conditions that existed within less than a billionth of a second after the "Big Bang" explosion -- probably around 15 billion years ago -- that created the known universe.
Scientists say this will give a much clearer view of how this created galaxies, planets -- and the life that so far is only known to exist on Earth.
To carry it out, CERN is building the world's largest scientific instrument -- the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC -- to operate in a 17-mile circular tunnel 225 feet down between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.
One of its main goals will be finally to catch the so-far theoretical "Higgs boson" that has eluded scientists at CERN and its U.S. counterpart Fermilab for nearly two decades.
The LHC replaces an earlier decade-long experiment known as the LEP, now dismantled, which two years ago came tantalisingly close to catching a glimpse of the Higgs boson that researchers believe gives matter its weight.
Like the LEP, but many times more powerful, the LHC will project particles of matter at vast speeds in opposite directions around the tunnel, and the 7,000 ton Atlas and another detector will record what happens when they collide.
Some 2,000 scientists from 150 research laboratories in 34 countries are involved in the some $8 billion LHC project -- also financially backed by the United States which 10 years ago abandoned an even larger one for cost reasons.
CERN, founded 50 years ago, has 20 European member states who largely finance it, but the European Commission (news - web sites), India, Israel, Japan, Russia, the United States and Turkey have observer status -- and contribute to -- the body.
I'll settle for the origin of the singularity.
No, in fact I see several disadvantages.
One of the main technical difficulties of a large accelerator is the fact that it changes shape to a degree much larger than the alignment tolerances. At LEP (which used the same tunnel that the LHC will use) they even have to compensate for the tides. In orbit the tides would be much worse, to say nothing of the problem of thermal warping.
More immediate concerns are our inability to construct large structures in space and our inability to deliver huge amounts of power in space, but presumably these tasks will someday be tractable. They will never be cheap, though.
What limits the size of an accelerator is usually the cost. In the case of the SSC, the size was determined by the physics requirements. In the case of the LHC, the limit was the construction cost. In the case of LEP, the lower bound limit to the size was the cost of powering the thing.
As you accelerate charged particles, they emit photons. Particles with a large charge-to-mass ratio, such as an electron, will emit photons with gamma-ray energies. This synchrotron radiation is constantly being shed by the beam, and that energy has to be replaced by the accelerator. The power radiated goes as E5/r2, where E is the beam energy and r is the radius of the accelerator. You can see that as the size gets larger, the cost of powering it actually goes down. (As the beam energy goes up, however, the cost goes dramatically up.)
"Cheap" is a relative concept - wealthy societies can afford to do things that relatively poorer societies cannot, even if the cost is the same for both of them. Even if the absolute cost of such things remains constant, someday it will be economically feasible simply due to the fact that we're so fabulously wealthy in material terms. Unless we screw it up by continually electing the libs, that is ;)
I am sure these are all valid areas of study. But, it would seem, they are simply the means men/humans have devised to explain what the Creator did. As for me, I will take the Eyewitness account, and leave it to you to explain what He did in whatever terms you wish.
BTW - these are not "religious" or "faith" statements. I am not a scientist, nor a physicist, but I have close friends that are, and they say there is plenty of "science" to support their contentions.
Did I make any of those statements? No. But, I would be more interested in the words of an Eyewitness, the Creator, than the conjecture of one of His creatures. And, I certainly did not say that I was anti-science. If scientists are what they claim, unbiased and open to discover whatever is true about the universe, why do you assume that anything that is not made of "matter" is unworthy of investigation?
I would ask you to explain, if you so chose, "Information." Information is not matter, it is not energy, and it is certainly not space. It can be transmitted by means of matter, but it is not dependent on the matter to exist. It can be transmitted by energy (morse code), but it is not energy. It can be transmitted through space, but it is not part of space. You can't touch information, you can't see it under a microscope, you can measure it with scales, nor with a ruler. But it truly exists. Is it not worthy of investigation because it can't be detected in the typical scientific manner?
Last question - what is the atomic structure of an idea? I would subnit, there are a lot of things in the universe that are not the subject of naturalistic scientific study, but are equally valid.
P.S. The order found in the universe indicates and orderly beginning. The Christian/Creationist scientist sets out to investigate that order. The naturalist, holding to random chance as the mechanism for all things, can not count on order...what you discover today may have changed tomorrow. How can you count on anything being consistent?
Believe whatever you like, but these aren't "just so" stories. Today's physics discoveries are tomorrow's technologies. Your can pray for your miracles; our kids will construct theirs.
That's "who" not "how".
I'm no atheist, but this is interesting.
What kind of argument is that? You admit that you don't know the subject matter, but you claim you have friends who do, and who say that you're correct. This is amazing. But what if I claim to have friends who don't agree with your friends?
42.....now where's my check?
Our kids have great challenges ahead of them. Only they can be the masters of their (and our) fate.
The particles move so fast that gravity is a very low order factor, essentially zero. However, gravity has an effect on the apparatus itself. Everything has to be aligned to a gnat's whisker and gravity is constantly putting parts under tension and compression, so, no doubt, things move and have to be checked all the time and readjusted. In space there wouldn't be nearly the same forces aside from natural resonances, springiness, and thermal effects due to heating and cooling. Alignment will probably be a major problem in space, too.
That's true, of course, but it's proper for us to use the brains God gave us to ask how He did it.
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