CERN

CERN


I’m guessing that most readers of this have not had a great deal of interest in or knowledge of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). This massive facility is located on the border between Switzerland and France and will be the subject of a great deal of news in the coming months. The reason that this facility will be newsworthy is because of the experiments in nuclear research that is about to get underway. The experiment will be conducted with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is a massive underground tunnel that houses a gigantic ring some 27 KM in circumference and containing some 9300 super conducting magnets with the whole thing cooled down to –192.2°C (-313.96°F) and evacuated to a vacuum better than outer space. Added to the scientific mix is a computer that can probably be qualified as the world’s largest and fastest with enough power to compute all of our federal income taxes in one fell swoop. And finally, some very special detectors that will be the center of attraction when the experiment finally gets underway after a false start a few months ago. What’s this all about? The multinational scientists and technicians will inject nuclear sub-particles called Hadrons and accelerate the particles around the ring until the particles reach a speed of over 99.999% the speed of light. But wait, there’s more. They will inject another batch of Hadrons into the ring, also going 99.999% of the speed of light, but heading in the opposite direction (one group of particles will be traveling in a clockwise direction and the other batch will be traveling in a counter clockwise direction at the same time). When every thing gets all revved up and everything is just right, they will cause to counter rotating beams of particles to collide head-on. If you had a smattering of science in your youth, you will realize that when things are accelerated they pick up momentum and when that momentum is suddenly halted, the momentum is converted into energy, and in this case, massive amounts of energy. Why are they doing this? They are trying to find all of the constituents of matter by banging them together with enough energy to cause all of the sub-particles to separate and go flying off. The separated particles will be detected and the scientists will study the flying chaos to determine how matter is made. The whole purpose of this experiment is meant to advance our understanding about the universe we live in. If this seems a bizarre way of trying to understand things, you are not alone. The banging together of particles in order to understand matter has been likened to banging two watches together and then studying the flying parts of the destroyed watches in order to understand time. I, along with many others, think these kinds of massive experiments misuse precious resources that could be better used elsewhere to further more practical findings. After all, a single man sitting alone with only a pencil and a pad of paper on his lap, provided most of the insight and knowledge we have today about the universe we live in. That single man was Albert Einstein. Einstein used his logic, reason and power of observation to make all of his discoveries and those discoveries and insights have never been disproved or improved upon. Oh, by the way, Einstein did it all without the necessity of a massive Large Hadron Collider. But wait, there is even more. There are some knowledgeable people who are concerned about colliding two counter-rotating beams of particles together with a relative speed nearly two times the speed of light. They are concerned that when that happens, a black hole will be created, and in an instant, the earth will be swallowed up and no more Monday night football with a cold brewski for any of us. Surly God will not be happy about this.