CERN launches the ‘Big Bang’

CERN is beginning to run experiments to recreate the ‘Big Bang’ theory of Universe creation on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).   While some fear that these experiments will lead to the destruction of Earth, physicists associated with the project from around the world have assured everyone that the experiments are safe.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was founded in 1954.  It is situated near Geneva, Switzerland on the Franco-Swiss border.   The primary research conducted at CERN is focused on studying the origins and workings of the Universe primarily through experiments in physics.

The LHC at CERN is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It is located 100 m (328 feet) underground straddling the Franco-Swiss border.  The accelerator is 26,259 m (over 16 miles) in length and contains 9300 magnets. Testing on the LHC was finished earlier this year and tomorrow the real experiments begin.

Physicists will begin looking for the origins of the Universe by performing a series of experiments.  Those experiments will hurtle

two beams of particles travel[ing] at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field, achieved using superconducting electromagnets.

Four different areas around the Collider will take measurements of the collisions for use in six different experiments.  The largest two experiments, ATLAS and CMS will be analyzing the multitude of particles created by the collisions.

Two smaller experiments, ALICE and LHCb will look for "specific phenomena" like "quark-gluon plasma" and b-quarks.  By analyzing these phenomena, scientists hope to learn more about anti-matter and the origins of the Universe.

The two smallest experiments TOTEM and LHCf will look at protons or heavy ions that don’t actually collide but just brush past each other. 

All of these experiments will involve thousands of scientists from universities and research laboratories worldwide.  Since these experiments are expected to produce over 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually, CERN created a new faster Internet connected only to the organizations involved. 

All of this data will eventually be housed at eleven major computer centers in France, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic Countries, Spain, Taipei, the UK and two sites in the U.S.  This is one of the largest and fastest grid computing networks in the world.

All of the fears about the earth being destroyed by black holes, strange matter or some other side effect from the LHC experiments have all been answered. 

So now we just wait and see what exactly makes up the universe.  At the end of all of the experiments and crunched calculations we may have an idea if  Higgs boson particles really exist,  the existence and make up of extra dimensions, and the makeup of dark matter.

Should a problem develop, well, science can’t get it right all the time, can it?

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