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Europe’s preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least €21 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab’s famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design—to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN’s location in Geneva, Switzerland—will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons well into the second half of the century. The approval is not yet...

Can we calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light? Franklin Felber (Starmark Inc) believes he can, with implications for propulsion. Back in 2006 we looked briefly at Felber’s work, describing what the physicist believes to be a repulsive gravitational field that emerges from his results. Felber discussed the matter at the Space Technology and Applications International meeting that year, where he presented his calculations of the ‘relativistically exact motion of a payload in the gravitational field of a source moving with constant velocity.’ Above a certain critical velocity, Felber believes, any mass...

When the LHC first went down, it was believed that repairs could get the system up and running by April 2009. Then we saw repairs pushing the timeline back to summer 2009. But now, CERN has arrived at a fork in the road regarding LHC repairs. According to spokesperson James Gillies, the complicated repairs can be simplified into modest Plan A and Plan B approach. Plan A is a quick and dirty fix, getting the particle accelerator online as quickly as possible (late summer 2009) at the cost of operating at lower power. In this scenario, 3 of 8 pressure...

MIT physicist gets death threats over collider September 9, 2008 01:19 PM By Carolyn Y. Johnson Frank Wilczek, an MIT physicist and Nobel laureate, has received death threats from what he called "one disturbed individual," as the world's largest physics experiment is poised to come online tomorrow in Europe.

Blaming George W. for everything from the dog's mange to an itch in places impolite to scratch is summer fun for a lot of people. So is listening to Barack Obama's gaffes, blunders and splutters. But repetition can make anything boring. So here's something new, scarier even than the Rev. Jesse Jackson's scheme to surgically alter Sen. Obama to make him eligible for the Ladies Auxiliary Choir. This doomsday would be the result of a misunderestimation beyond the ability of George W. Physicists will fire up something called the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland next month and if everything goes...