It is coming, beware. The most powerful collider ever conceived by man will launch it's first beam on September 10, 2008. In case you are not familiar with what a collider is, it is a huge machine for smashing tiny pieces of material at light speed. In this case the machine is about 16 miles in diameter and underground and it will smash something called a hadron. That is defined as a bound state of quarks which are other particles. Strong nuclear forces hold them together. An example of this is either a proton or neutron. The way the machine works is that it has several smaller circles built into the tract that will allow the beam that is shot into the machine to continue to accelerate before it hits the main 16 mile loop, thus allowing it to reach light speed minus about 10 meters per second. Light speed is about 186,000 miles per second. For the sake of argument this beam will reach the speed of 185,999.999999 miles per hour or so, I could be a little off, but these figures are only to give you an idea of what is going on. What type of particles are neutrons and protons?

Neutrons are subatomic particles with no electric charge and they are slightly bigger than a proton. A proton is different in that it does contain an electrical charge of one positive unit. The collider is located in Switzerland and France. It spans both sides of the borders of those countries and is near Geneva Switzerland. It was funded by over 8,000 physicists who come from more than 85 countries and the funding was joined by hundreds of universities and laboratories. Why is there so much interest in this device? It seems the entire world is anxious for it to get going. One of the main reasons is that the scientists think that they just might find what is called the god particle. When they smash hadrons together, they get smaller particles and they are hoping that they will find the one particle that is responsible for holding all matter together. They also feel that if they don't find it, that will also be significant The scientists don't understand how massless elementary particles cause matter to have mass. The god particle or Higgs boson, as the scientists call it, has only been predicted, but never seen.

There has been non conclusive evidence produced by the Large Electron Positron Collider, the LEP, for a god particle, but that evidence is open to interpretation The LEP, or Large Positron Collider, was turned off in the year 2,000. Previously it was used for 11 years. It had to be dismantled so that the new tunnels for the LHC could be built. The new collider boasts some of the most powerful magnets ever created. These magnets are needed to keep the beams of particles on a precise trajectory. The way the LHC is set up, the beams actually pass each other before they finally collide. The main magnet is so powerful that it is said that if all the energy was released from it at once, it would be equal to 2.4 tons of TNT. The beam that carries the particles carries the equivalent of the volume of one grain of fine sand. The magnets must be cooled and it takes 96 tons of helium to do this job. There are about 1,600 magnets installed in the LHC and most weigh over 27 tons.

Some scientists claim that with the huge energy output of this machine, it just might be possible to create a black hole. Others laugh at the idea and claim that as powerful as this machine is, it is nowhere as powerful as the forces in nature that produce black holes, but then they go on to say something else, something that doesn't exactly instill confidence it there statement. They say that even if black holes were created, they would only last for a microsecond and be the size of the tip of a pin. This makes you wonder if we are playing with things here that we shouldn't be, doesn't it. If there was even the slightest chance that black holes would be created, should we be doing this?

There is no doubt that this new collider will produce some results that were never seen before. You have to be excited over this. One of the things that I can't help but think about is the fact that we are accelerating something to just about the speed of light. It seems to me that this should also give us the chance to perform experiments in several other areas that have nothing to do with particles. The first area that I can think of is time. It might be interesting to observe the effect on the beam as it travels faster and faster approaching light speed. We can look for subtle changes. Will the particles age differently or are the measurements required too fine for us to determine since the beam circles the machine so many thousands of times per second? The second thing that comes to mind is that the scientists that have been using these colliders for so many years might just find a way to accelerate matter without that huge ring structure and if they do, it might be useful in space travel. I guess we would have to call this Warp 1.

We seem to be on the verge of building smaller particle accelerators. According to an article in New Scientist, a meter long plasma powered particle accelerator can boost the energy of an electron to the same degree as a 3 kilometer long machine. Three kilometers is almost 2 miles. One scientist has said, “this is an incredible breakthrough. Now they have to work on the details." There is a drawback to this system however, only about 1% of the particles in the beam reach the target.

The LHC was constructed in such a way that there are four stations for experiments along the ring. They are mostly modular and the devices can be replaced with others for different experiments. These devices are huge however and require a lot of muscle and time to move, but they give flexibility to the entire machine. If the god particle is not found, one scientist has commented that he will no longer understand why he thinks that he does. I can understand that, because that means that we will still not be able to say what is holding us together. Along with that, we will be ignorant as to what causes mass. I guess we will just have to hope for success and that all those scientists, countries and universities will not be disappointed.

*Update - Due to a malfunction in a tunnel the machine will be offline until next spring.