I'm nowhere near an expert on this, but I've been reading more and more about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), arguably the most complex machine mankind has ever built, to be turned on today around 8:15am British Summer Time.
The more I read, the more my mind goes all goopy with real-life sci-fi excitement as I desperately wish I had worked harder in school and chosen to be a particle physicist. Or at least read that book The Big Bang that has been sitting on my night table for 2 months.
Alas, I am not a particle physicist and I have limited time as I type up this diary while I'm at work, so I post this in hopes that someone with more knowledge and/or time will be inspired to delve deeper. (A note of caution to that kind soul – be careful when googling "big bang".)
Below the fold: dark matter, the Big Bang, black holes, more about the LHC. Oh, and a dash of public anxiety related to science that "they" don't want to accept or understand. Oh, and an awesome - AWESOME - music video that explains the whole thing, too.
By looking at gravity and the location and movement of galaxies, scientists figured out the mass of our galaxy and of the universe. Then they counted up all the stars and planets and gasses and stuff – anything with mass (that would be matter, right?) – and they found a rather large discrepancy: in fact, only about 4% of the mass of the universe can be accounted for by what we can see. Enter dark matter, which is thought to make up a large portion of that discrepancy.
Why can't we see it? No biggie: it's in another dimension. Andddd... my heart just skipped a beat.
The past weekend I read an article in the New Scientist that included a fantastic summary of the search for the particles (weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs) that are a prominent theory in accounting for dark matter. I highly recommend it for some background. Unfortunately the link is not free.
Then there's the whole Big Bang thing. As the universe expanded, particles collided and particle-antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions - continuously "annihilating" each other. Then something crazy happened – little by little (within a millionth of a millionth of a second) matter outnumbered antimatter. And the universe was born.
But where did the dark matter come from, and what is it? And how did the matter start to outnumber the antimatter?
The Higgs boson, an elementary particle that has never been observed in a lab, may help answer some of these questions. From wikipedia:
The Higgs boson or BEH Mechanism, popularised as the "God Particle", is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics; it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Experimental observation would elucidate how otherwise massless elementary particles nevertheless manage to construct mass in matter. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the material world.
Scientists have been searching for the Higgs boson, as well as some answers to the mysteries of the Big Bang, with particle colliders. They smash particles together to simulate these reactions and observe.
And now, the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, the LHC is about to smash them together with 7 times the power of previous colliders. They're using magnets, kind of like how maglev railways work, to have some particles flying around way and other particles flying around the other way near the speed of light, in hopes that they'll annihilate each other. And they're watching what happens.
A couple of weeks ago I posted this awesome video to the overnight open thread. It basically explains the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its purpose in a nutshell:
Now, theoretically, this annihilation is one way to create a black hole: a "region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon." (The event horizon being the point of no return.)
Black holes are real things, and they are mind goopingly awesome and scary.
However all scientists in the field accept that in the unlikely event that a mini black hole were created by the LHC, it would immediately decay by Hawking radiation, and even if by some miracle it stuck around, it would be too small to eat the planet. Still, there are a bunch of concern trolls out there who think that these black holes will somehow stay alive and their gravitational forces will start sucking the earth's mass in, sending us all through to that point of no return. (I won't even bother discussing the religious implications.) These ill-informed groups have protested and sued the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to try to stop them from turning it on. Thusfar they've been unsuccessful in their evil mission.
LET THE PARTICLE COLLIDING BEGIN!!
(Feel free to correct me on any of this information!)
UPDATE:
Here is a stunning photo album of the LHC. H/T Trix
And here is a live webcast of the LHC in action! H/T Arken