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The largest scientific experiment in human history.
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About 7,000
international scientists from 85 countries working at an underground complex started up a
huge particle-smashing machine on Wednesday, 10th September 2008 aiming to recreate the conditions of
the "Big Bang" that created the universe. Experts say it is the largest scientific experiment in human history and the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest and most complex machine ever made.
The project organized by the members of European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), conducted
inside the tightly-sealed chamber buried under the Swiss-French border, could
unlock many secrets of modern physics and answer questions about the universe and its origins.
The 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) machine's debut came as a blip on a
screen in the control room, with a particle beam the size of a human hair
appearing in the 27-km (17-mile) circular tunnel. |
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The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major
test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile (27-kilometer)
tunnel on Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to
understanding the makeup of the universe.
The several hundred physicists and technicians huddled in the control room
celebrated loudly again when a particle beam made a full counter-clockwise
trajectory of the accelerator, successfully completing the machine's first major task.
After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at
10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length
of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider. "There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.
Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing
scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now
have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms
together in attempts to see how they are made. |
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The start of the collider, described as the biggest physics experiment in
history, comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collision of
protons could eventually imperil the earth. But James Gillies, chief
spokesman for CERN and the leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking
dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.
The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the
speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. Smaller
colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Less than
100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest
components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown
they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and
possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the
hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, believed to give mass to all other
particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
Once the particle-smashing experiment gets to full speed, data measuring the
location of particles to a few millionths of a metre, and the passage of time to
billionths of a second, will show how the particles come together, fly apart, or
dissolve. It is in these conditions that scientists hope to find fairly quickly a
theoretical particle known as the Higgs Boson, named after Scottish scientist
Peter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964, as the answer to the mystery of how
matter gains mass.
Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never have taken shape
in the aeons after the Big Bang, and life could never have begun - on Earth or,
if it exists as many cosmologists believe, on other worlds either. The Big Bang is thought to have occurred 15 billion years ago
when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in a void,
spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth. |
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Some 1,200 scientists
are from the United States, an observer country which contributed US$ 531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.
Sudhir Raniwala and Rashmi Raniwala, associate professors of physics at Rajasthan University, are among the 30-odd physicists from India, who are part of this experiment. Raniwala
said, "We have designed the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which has been fitted in the LHC, in which small particles (protons) will be accelerated and made to collide at the highest-ever man-made
speed."
The Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) will play a key role in this experiment. The PMD was developed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata, which is a body of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the machines were transported to Geneva from February this year. |
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