The Biggest Thing in Physics

Gabrielle Walker in Discover:

Near the west end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, buried under the river plain of the Rhône, workers are fitting together the final pieces of the machine that hopes to unlock one of the biggest mysteries of the universe. It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.

The “large” in Large Hadron Collider is something of an understatement. “Enormous” is closer: The collider’s underground tunnel carves a circle 17 miles in circumference, traversing the border between Switzerland and France. At four locations it passes through caverns crammed with detectors the size of buildings. In a deliberately constructed rivalry, two of these detectors—along with their armies of scientists, engineers, and technicians—will vie with each other to discover the obscure but wildly important particle known as the Higgs boson.

More here.

Comments

[jean-paul]

Just a tech note for mac users. The Discovery magazine link did not work in my Safari (3.0.3) with 10.4.10, but opens correctly in Camino (the first other browser i tried). So if this happens to you...

[Winfield J. Abbe]

Physics and science would be better served if one "looked" at what is there instead of looking for what someone says is or may be there, because the latter could prejucially influence the outcome. It is much more fun and likely much more enlightening to go exploring without the ball and chain of prejudiced ideas of others holding back new discoveries. The same thing could be said for other investigations, like the failed war on cancer, which has been prejudiced for nearly 50 years of failed genetic speculations while "scientists" disregard the experiments and facts already discovered and developed by Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D. and confirmed by the experiments of many others over the years. The war on cancer has got nowhere notwithstanding the squandering of multi billions of public and private dollars as proved by the fact that about one person dies every minute either from cancer, "treatment" or both. Most of these "scientists" have not even read any of his 500+ scientific papers at all, but formed their prejudiced opinion based on the inuendo and prejudiced opinions of other prejudiced non-scientists.

[Dave Ranning]

"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country.

I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime".

— Albert Einstein, 1947

At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on Albert Einstein had grown to nearly 100,000 pages, yet they contain not one scintilla of evidence indicating he was disloyal or involved in any subversive or criminal activity.

[senderista]

@Winfield:

And just how do you propose sifting through terabytes of raw data without any idea what you're looking for?