Bigger Bang Theory: Einstein's Telescope dwarfs Large Hadron Collider

Davey Winder
Sunday, 14 September 2008 15:38

Science - Energy

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...

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