Davey Winder
Sunday, 14 September 2008 16:38
Science -
Energy
Page 1 of 2
The Large Hadron Collider has got the world talking about life, the universe and everything. Oh, and black holes and death, of course. Just wait until people hear about it's big brother: the International Linear Collider...
It is all about the bang. Well that and the stuff that is created as a
result. Who would have thought that the world's media, and in turn much
of the world it seems, would get so excited about a bunch of physicists
searching for the Higgs boson, BEH Mechanism or the God Particle?
Call it what you will, the hunt for the meaning
of life, the universe and everything has certainly got us all thinking.
Mainly about the end of the world, it has to be said.
However, as already reported at iTWire you can remove your head
from between your knees and relax, because
the world is not going to
end any time soon.
The Internet might just
get a little faster as a direct result though.
But I digress, the Large Hadron Collider has only just been switched
on, and will spend some weeks accelerating particles around the big
atomic racetrack in different directions before deliberately crashing
them together at a speed so zany it is hard to get your head around.
But let's at least try. The LHC tunnel, some 300 feet underneath
Switzerland and France, is an impressive 27km circuit. Proton beams are
fired around this at 99.99975 percent of the speed of light.
To put that into some perspective, that means a beam can complete
something close to 11,000 laps of the 27km circuit every single second.
It is when the beams, travelling in opposing directions around the
circuit, are guided into one another that the 'big bang' experiment
does its stuff. The collision energy involved being 7 GeV, or 7 billion
electron Volts if that makes it any clearer.
I didn't think so. Basically, an electron Volt, or eV, is just the
amount of energy that an electron picks up when moving through a
potential difference of 1 volt in a vacuum. It is the standard unit of
energy in particle physics.
If you thought all that sounded impressive, just wait until you read
page 2 and discover what Einstein’s Telescope, the real Big Bang
machine, can do...
CONTINUES
