The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
So, we know that the Large Hadron Collider is big, and
you might be forgiven for thinking if it is big enough, powerful
enough, to get some scientists talking about it having the potential to
end the world.
Forgiven, but wrong. In the world of particle
physics, it would seem, bigger is better. To prove it, let me introduce
you to the International Linear Collider.
Not only will the ILC be bigger than the LHC, a 31km dead straight
tunnel is planned for the first stage of the project but the current
baseline design already allows for an upgrade to 50km if needed.
Not only will it smash those particles together with a much higher
collision energy of 500 GeV, around 70 times more powerful than the LHC
which now seems a bit meek at just 7 GeV.
Not only could that be increased to a mind-boggling 1 TeV, or 1
trillion electron Volt collision during the second stage of the project
if the 50km tunnel was completed.
But on top of all of that, the International Linear Collider has a really cool nickname: Einstein's Telescope.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has been trying to come up with one for
the LHC
but so far has only managed 'The Big Banger' and 'Colossitron' which
really do not cut the mustard.
So why the need for Einstein's Telescope in the first place? Surely one
end of the world machine is enough? Well, no, actually it isn't.
While it is hoped that the LHC will effectively point the way towards
the answers to those universal questions, Einstein's Telescope will
actually provide the missing pieces in the puzzle and solve it once and
for all.
Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at Oxford University
and European director of the project explains:
“The LHC smashes protons together to discover new particles but also
generates lots of debris that obscures the fine detail. The ILC would
be a much cleaner machine and tell us far more about their real nature.”
It is all early days for the three year old project though. Only UKP
£150 million has bee spent so far, and the ILC is likely to eclipse the
UKP £5 billion cost of the LHC in total. Final designs are not expected
to be agreed upon and complete until 2012 at the earliest.
David Bass
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