And the World Comes to an End..

Particle physics is at a stage today where optics was around three centuries back. At that time scientists were making first attempts to measure speed of light accurately. Today, principles of optics are utilized from creation of household appliances to enabling global communication infrastructure. Numerous inventions like deep space telescopes, optical storage, laser surgery etc have been made possible because of our understanding of this branch of science. All of this must had been unthinkable three centuries back.

Similarly, it is anybody's guess where theories of particle physics will lead us centuries down the line. But that question will arise only if we survive for that long.

CERN, the leading body for nuclear research has built a Large Hadron Collider. Before going further it be interesting to note that US was in the process of building a similar but much more powerful machine around 15 years back. Project was cancelled citing the price tag of 12 billion dollars. Just to put things in perspective, cost of Iraq war has exceeded 570 billion dollars. CERN spent total of six billion dollars for the project.

From every viewpoint, project is massive and have goal to understand nothing less than the creation of the universe.

In a nutshell, project aims to collide very high energy beam of protons and lead ions head on to observe creation of new particles and to validate existence of a theorized particle.

Outcome of this experiment is purely theoretical and i.e. what keeping doomsayers happy. To an extent that there had been a lawsuit filed against the experiment. Some theorists postulates that the collision can produce tiny black holes and can thus end everything we know. CERN's stand is that collisions like these occur naturally by cosmic rays.

Experiment is taking place on 10th September. Just two weeks more or less. Bigger question is.. what if?

So it is time to figure out how to make best out of next two weeks. I go take a nap first :).

Links:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/arts/...
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx