The Hubble Telescope of Inner Space

innerSpaceman · 05-16-2007, 12:59 PM

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.

05-16-2007, 12:59 PM	#1
innerSpaceman Kink of Swank Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Inner Space Posts: 13,075	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.
	Submit to Quotes