The Hubble Telescope of Inner Space
 

They are getting ready to see the universe born again.

Again and again and again — 30 million times a second, in fact.


Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.


Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas (photo and story here) and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.


Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then — relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago — will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the "Groundhog Day" movie. If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory.

"We are now on the endgame," said Lyn Evans, of CERN, who has been in charge of the Large Hadron Collider, as it is called, since its inception. Call it the Hubble Telescope of Inner Space. Everything about the collider sounds, well, large — from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy with which it will smash together protons, its cast of thousands and the $8 billion it cost to build, to the 128 tons of liquid helium needed to cool the superconducting magnets that keep the particles whizzing around their track and the three million DVDs worth of data it will spew forth every year.


The innerSpace geek in me finds this extremely cool. If it doesn’t work out, the days of building huge supercolliders are likely over. Click the link above for photos and more of the article about this subatomic marvel of accessing BigBang conditions.
:iSm:

thats....sorta scary on some quantum level.

Cool article! Does this




remind you of space mountain?

I thought this sounded familiar.

Well then, we can consider this our annual update.


The fearmongering of the former article is pleasantly missing from the current one, which instead attempts to describe what the scientists are aiming for - rather than going off on some sci-fi "the universe is falling" tangent of disaster movie scenarios.

My thoughts exactly. What happend in Spiderman II is not true to life people.....

Yes, but Soylent Green IS

great on a ritz?
often mixed with vegimite?

If I see garbage trucks scooping people up in my neighborhood. I am so out of here....

I'd pay to have garbage trucks pick up some of the people in my neighborhood :)