The God Particle

[MacNimon]

One of the biggest machines ever built has been completed, and will be switched on in September. The Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is 17 miles long, and was built in a circular tunnel 300 feet below the France/Switzerland border. In this, scientists hope to mimic the moments after the Big Bang by sending two beams of particles called 'Hadrons' in opposite directions round the tunnel at 99.9999% of the speed of light (ie 11,245 times round the tunnel each second) and with the force of an aircraft carrier sailing at 11 knots. When the two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures 100,000 hotter than the heart of the sun. And once they have collided, scientists hope that detectors the size of Westminster Abbey will detect, among other things, the particle which causes everything in the universe to have mass...ie 'the God Particle'.

Many people, however are in a state of panic over the forthcoming experiments, claiming that that they could have 'apocalyptic' results. A law suit has even been filed in Hawaii against "the big bang machine" saying that it could herald the end of the world. The fear is that mini black holes could be formed during the collisions, and that they could last long enough to become bigger, more powerful black holes which could then suck the rest of the world in towards Switzerland, until there is nothing left.

On the other hand, and we're going into the realms of science fiction here, there are others who believe that wormholes may be formed, opening up the possibilities of time travel in the future. They predict that travellers from the future may be able to use the wormholes to travel back in time to the creation of the first wormhole, but no further.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...achenbach-text


So, is the end of the world nigh? Or is it the start of an exciting new era of scientific discovery?

Or will it be the biggest white elephant in history?

[Wayne]

It looks like Star Trek!

When the two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures 100,000 hotter than the heart of the sun.

That bit sounds scary! Is that actually possible? And if so, Won't the tunnel melt? We need Jason & Jon on this one!

[Antony Cox]

I heard about this on the radio last week and thought how similar the situation was to Inferno...

[WhiteCrow]

One of my tutors at the University of Sheffield was Prof Fred Combley who did a lot of work at CERN. I think he was one of the guys pushing for a new piece of kit, but alas as he died back in 2001, he's not lived to see it completed and the new era of study it'll lead to.

But I know he'd have been very excited.

[Jon Masters]

Practical particle physics is all about energy - the more energy you can give things, the more energy they will have when they collide, and the collision is more likely to release subatomic particles. So for particle accelerators, the bigger the better, and in this case by having two sets of particles travelling in opposite directions when they hit, the more energy you've got.

The problem for theoretical particle physicists is that while they can come up with upteen different explanations for how subatomic particles work, interact and produce forces, all of them rely on some kind of definitve practical based proof. Hence all the excitement about the LHC - loads of theories hang in the balance while they wait to see what practical results they get. This includes why there's more matter than antimatter (which boils down to something called the CP problem) and trying to link gravity and relativity to quantum mechanics and particles.

Sadly my suspicion is that even when it gets going, there will probably be loads of hiccups and errors which may mean we still don't get a definitive answer to the questions.

As for the safety things, well most of them come from some of the more extreme theoretical models so are fairly unlikely anyway. The miniblack hole one is interesting not because they might grow (and hell, its only France and Switzerland anyway ) but because if they "collapse" like many predict they will, the radiation released might be quite unusual.
I wouldn't hang around CERN waiting for any blue boxes to turn up though.

There's some quite useful information on Wiki or you could get very technical and go to the Horse's mouth here

New Scientist tends to mention something which the LHC will prove/disprove almost every week too.

PS there's some nasty science in the original statements - temperature should be taken with a pinch of salt, since the whole thing has to be supercooled and a vacuum to work anyway, and force should probably be replaced with energy about the aircraft carrier.

[MacNimon]

PS there's some nasty science in the original statements - temperature should be taken with a pinch of salt, since the whole thing has to be supercooled and a vacuum to work anyway, and force should probably be replaced with energy about the aircraft carrier.

Those items were quoted from The Glasgow Herald (well, the Sunday Herald to be accurate) a reputable broadsheet, so it just shows that it's not only the tabloids who are guilty of inaccurate journalism...

Still, it's good to see stories like this getting double page spreads in national newspapers rather than being confined to science mags or the net.

[Rob McCow]

The 'end of the world' angle is always great for science coverage! Though I doubt that they'll be able to make a black hole. If they'd made an accelerator roughly the same size as the sun I'd be more concerned.

You can never have a big enough particle accelerator.

When are we going to get quantum entanglement used properly for encryption?

[WhiteCrow]

Yes the mini-black holes are nothing to worry about - let me add this for all my MSc is worth.

If a mini-black hole is formed, it's going to be about the size of a single atom, probably much smaller, on the level of an atomic nuclei. It will just mean a tiny particle of superdense matter has been created.

Most likely such material will be unstable, and decay back to normal matter. Even if not, all you will have is a single super dense atom, which will just weigh as much as several normal atoms - ie on the cosmic sense of things, nothing terrible.

[WhiteCrow]

By the way there's a lot of misunderstanding about Black Holes, as I've said they're just superdense bodies really.

From reasonable distances, there is no difference between the gravity from a black hole or a normal body.

So if we replaced the Moon with a black hole of equal mass, the Earth would feel the same gravity effect as before. In fact life could go on here on Earth as normal, no end of the world stuff.

The only problem would be the Black-Hole-Moon would be about the size of a marble. And if you got close enough to it, the gravity would be enormous - but you would have to get really close.

[Jon Masters]

Warning, Will Robinson !!

Its a very dangerous move to start discussing Black Holes and their properties on PS !!

[Dirk Gently]

I thought that it was impossible to orbit a black hole!

[Jon Masters]

[Jason Thompson]

I don't know, do you really want to get me started on black holes again, Wayne...

As has already been pointed out, black holes are not infinite suction devices. They are simply supercondensed objects. The cause of their 'greater' gravity is simply that you can get a lot closer to them than the original mass. Gravity is inversely proprtional to the square of the distance from the centre of mass, which is to say that if you halve the distance you quadruple the gravity. If you don't change the distance you don't change the gravitational attraction. So, a mini-black hole won't suddenly have any effect on the surrounding countryside greater than the effect of the original mass of particles that went into making it.

As for the temperature, yes it is possible to generate such extreme temperatures, but in such a disperse stream of particles that's not a problem. think of your oven. You can heat it to about 200 degrees. The interior of the oven is at that temperature uniformly, sides, shelves, air, the lot. If you touch the side you feel an instant burn and your skin blisters in a very short time. But you can reach into the air that is at similar temperatures and not get burned. It's all to do with how much energy is transmitted in collisions between particles. The air molecules are more disperse than in the solid shelf, so fewer collisions take place between them and your skin, hence less energy is transmitted to heat up your skin. So, in the LHC there may be enormous temperatures generated in the collisions, but there will be insufficient mass of particles present to transfer that heat to the chamber walls enough to melt them.

[WhiteCrow]

Well put Jason - yes I just wanted to get over some of the real science about Black Holes.

Alas there's a lot of misconception about them due to bad sci-fi. All too often they're given strange and exotic properties. I'm surprised fans aren't exited that the existence of a Black Hole might cause Elvis to come back.

[Wayne]

Warning, Will Robinson !!

Its a very dangerous move to start discussing Black Holes and their properties on PS !!

@Jon!

I don't know, do you really want to get me started on black holes again, Wayne...

As for the temperature, yes it is possible to generate such extreme temperatures, but in such a disperse stream of particles that's not a problem. think of your oven. You can heat it to about 200 degrees. The interior of the oven is at that temperature uniformly, sides, shelves, air, the lot. If you touch the side you feel an instant burn and your skin blisters in a very short time. But you can reach into the air that is at similar temperatures and not get burned. It's all to do with how much energy is transmitted in collisions between particles. The air molecules are more disperse than in the solid shelf, so fewer collisions take place between them and your skin, hence less energy is transmitted to heat up your skin. So, in the LHC there may be enormous temperatures generated in the collisions, but there will be insufficient mass of particles present to transfer that heat to the chamber walls enough to melt them.

Ok thanks for explaining that Jason, & bear in mind your talking to a science simpleton here. But "100,000 hotter than the heart of the sun." That's some serious temperature isn't it! I have a hard time taking that in. Isn't the centre of a star the hottest thing known to man? Or am i completely wrong there? I suppose i have this layman's Sci-Fi conception that pretty much everything will burn up if it enters the sun. Or is that like a cosmic equivalent of touching the side of the oven?

[Jason Thompson]

Pretty much anything will burn up if it enters the Sun, but the Sun is a very dense object. It is often hard to get across the sometimes counterintuitive details.

For example, the Sun is a huge ball of gas, but at its core it is more dense than rock. The temperature of its corona (the region that becomes visible during a total eclipse) is several million degrees, but because the corona is so disperse you could stand in it and freeze. Temperature and heat are releated but are not the same. It's all relative, so to speak. A single particle may have huge amounts of kinetic energy for its size, and hence high temperature, but that is still a tiny tiny amount on our scale. So you can have a stream of atoms or subatomic particles that are at a temperature of billions of degrees, but they're not producing huge amounts of heat on the scale of the apparatus used because there just aren't eough of them.

One other thing to ponder: for some time we have been able to generate animatter in particle accelerators. The collision of matter and antimatter results in complete annihilation and the total conversion of mass to energy. That's a hell of a lot of energy on an atomic scale, far more than is released even in the fusion reactions at the core of the Sun. Why didn't we see huge explosions as a result? Because there were so few particles produced that the total energy released was minuscule.

And finally, you are not alone in having trouble with this stuff. Did you see the energy scale on the power complex in Doctor Who And The Silurians? They were giving off energy readings in mega electron volts. Sounds like a big number, but in reality an electron volt is such a tiny number that even millions of them won't power a lightbulb!

[Wayne]

Thanks again Jason for the comprehensive answer. There's obviously a lot more to it than the rather alarming sounding "100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun" as printed in the paper!

[Jason Thompson]

First rule: there is always a lot more to any scientific story than is printed in the papers.

[Paul Monk]

This has just made me realise just how rusty my physics has become. I need to brush up. Radioactivity (i should really say ionising radioactivity) is really my speciality now and there's an awful lot of rubbish written about that.

I love these types of threads especially when Jason gets going. I could read his science stuff all day!

[Wayne]

He's even got me treating it seriously for once.

[Jon Masters]

One way I use at school to try to get your head round the difference between heat and temperature is to think of temperature as being related to the average energy of all the particles present, and heat to be the total energy of the particles present.

So a bath of hot water and a mug of hot water could have the same temperature (because its an average) but the bath will contain more heat because there are more particles, so it will cool down slower.

A handful of partcles whizzing around at close to the speed of light will all have a high energy each, so their average will be high (temperature) but their total won't be that exciting because there are so few of them.

[Wayne]

I like these layman terms analogies. Even i can understand that!

[SiHart]

I feel like I'm learning stuff today. I was never any good at all at the physics stuff at school- the other sciences I could do ok. Perhaps I needed Jon to teach me!

Si xx

[Wayne]

It's the B5 connection.

[Antony Cox]

This collider thingy - is it like a bunsen burner?