Peter Ginter Fotografie. http://www.peterginter.com
Granted, I have just woken up from a nap and it is Easter Monday but having heard today on NPR about the work going on at CERN, Switzerland [Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research], and looking at photos of what scientists are creating, such as this humoungous magnet, I have to shake my head in wonder that there are people who understand all this and that there are people with the creativity, imagination and perseverance to create objects like this. A sixteen-mile tunnel to smash particles? Hoping to create black holes? It is way beyond my comprehension. It is amazing.
This object is ALICE: the acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, one of the largest experiments in the world devoted to research in the physics of matter at an infinitely small scale.
The project that most fascinates me simply because I understand so little about it is their collider:
CERN’s major project to build the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, has recently made some impressive leaps towards the finishing line. One eighth of the machine is now complete, the entire ‘cryogenic distribution line’ has been installed, and CERN has taken delivery of all the main magnets required to build the LHC.
This gigantic scientific machine is located inside a circular underground tunnel of 27 km circumference approximately 100 metres beneath Switzerland and France. It was initially conceived 22 years ago and the construction was approved 10 years later. When fully operational, it will reach seven times the energy of the most powerful particle accelerator currently in use. Scientists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two beams of particles travelling in opposite directions at close to the speed of light.
The construction of the LHC is divided into eight sectors, each approximately 3 km in length. On 10 November, the magnets, cryogenic distribution line, and other systems and services of one of these sectors were completely interconnected.
During the LHC’s operation, thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes will be used to navigate the beams of particles around the accelerator. These magnets form a ring inside the 27 km tunnel, 22 km of which is composed of 1624 superconducting main magnets. CERN took delivery of the last of these on 27 November, thus completing the full set of main magnets required to build the LHC.
To achieve the high magnetic field required to bend the path of the particle beam around the accelerator, the magnets must perform in a ‘superconducting’ state where there is no loss of power. This requires chilling the machine core to a temperature of -271°C throughout the LHC’s operation – this is even colder than outer space! A ‘cryogenic distribution line’ spanning the entire length of the tunnel will serve this purpose; its installation was successfully completed on 19 October.
The LHC will be central to the next generation of experiments at CERN, enabling scientific investigations that have never been possible before. A new frontier of knowledge will shed light on the unresolved questions of science, through for example the search for the elusive ‘Higgs boson’ to explain the origin of particle mass, particles that could make up dark matter, and the existence of extra dimensions of space. With the recent triple achievements, the LHC is well on course to welcome in the new year, with eager anticipation for its start-up expected in November 2007. (from a December 2006 release)
On a more public scale, CERN created the world-wide web in 1990, which enables this miniscule blog to appear to y'all.
For those of you who are wondering, yes, this is the place where Dan Brown's character in Angels and Demons chases down someone who has stolen antimatter to explode so as to blow up the Vatican. The CERN website actually has an entire page devoted to True/False questions about Brown's book.
I am thrown to Pascale's thought: La grandeur de ces vastes espaces m'effraie.
The grandeur of these vast spaces awes/frightens me.
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