Fun Physics Facts
February 8, 2008
Large Hadron Collider:
For those that have not yet caught wind of what is arguably one of the greatest advances in human scientific history, you might want to read up on the LHC or Large Hadron Collider. For a crash course on this beast machine, it is an enormous 30-mile long track designed to propel particles using superconducting magnets along its length, which runs through both France and Switzerland, and eventually collide packets of protons 30 million times per second into one another at 99.99999991% the speed of light. The goal here is to find the Higgs Boson. While almost everything you are familiar with is most notably of fermions, bosons are rather quirky. This one in particular is believed to be the token of mass itself, the very unit gravity clings to. When we detect, in the femptoseconds of particle soup the proton collisions create, a single floating hunk of mass with nothing to claim it, we will have found the Higgs boson and maybe even the keys to a new age of physics although we would never scoff at some more data on beautiful or Bottom Quarks, antimatter or cosmic fireballs of quark-gluon plasma. Although concern has been voiced in response to the notion that we might inadvertently create a black hole into which all of humanity and its hallowed machinations might plummet, the experts at CERN feel certain that the risk of such an event is pretty low.