The world's largest particle accelerator will conduct its inaugural test tomorrow morning, shooting protons at near-light speed around its 17-mile ring. Tomorrow afternoon, thousands of contributing international scientists will breathe a well-deserved sigh of relief. Unless of course the accelerator creates a black hole that devours the Earth, which probably won't happen. I think.
Nobody knows precisely what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will reveal, but whatever it is will shake our understanding of the universe. The LHC will recreate conditions from just after the Big Bang by colliding two ludicrously fast proton beams head-on. A few dozen months and lots of physics voodoo later, scientists may discover why mass exists, whether our universe has extra dimensions and how everything began. They may learn more about antimatter, dark matter, or other matter we don't even know we should know about yet. Or maybe they'll find the lost colony of Roanoke Island and the crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste, although that's as improbable as the Earth-devouring black hole theory.
Estimated to cost more than $6 billion, the LHC breaks every physics record in the book. Trying to understand those records is a bit like trying to count ounces of water in the Atlantic; after a while, the numbers lose all meaning. It's the largest machine in the world, capable of accelerating particles to 99.99% the speed of light and then smashing them together 600 million times per second, each with an energy of 14 TeV (tera-electron volts). All sorts of weird conditions exist within the accelerator, including the emptiest, hottest, and coldest spaces in the solar system. It's also the awesomest place in the solar system. The collisions will generate 100,000 times more heat than the center of the sun and, more importantly, won't melt everyone within a 100 mile radius.
But why should you care? Well, besides possibly overturning everything we know about everything, the LHC can perform at least one other crucial task: inspire Gator pride. Our own professors Andrey Korytov, Darin Acosta, and Guenakh Mitselmakher (as well as several others) helped design the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the LHC's two general purpose detectors. If you want to learn more about UF's contributions to the LHC, as well as the science behind it, stay tuned because there's more to follow. In the coming weeks, I'll blog on UF's latest scientific endeavors and some of its past accomplishments. Sarcasm no extra charge.
