September 10, 2008

The best explanation I could find on what the Large Hadron Collider was designed for...
A recipe. Build two pipes, each about 6 centimetres wide and 27 kilometres long. Bend them both into a circle and cool to 1.9 kelvin, about 300 °C below room temperature. Fill with protons - about a hundred billion of them to start with - all travelling as close to the speed of light as possible. Add a magnetic field a hundred thousand times more powerful than the Earth's to steer the particles through the pipes. And make sure the protons in each pipe move in opposite directions.

Now here's the exciting bit. Align the two pipes so that the particles collide. About twenty protons should smash into each other, creating showers of other particles. Take a good look at each one. If you spot a particle you don't recognise, shout.

Finally, repeat forty million times. Each second.

- New Scientist 1994 article
Wired too has an insightful take on the Best and Worst Case Scenarios for the world's costliest scientific experiment. See also the funny FAQ in the sidebar.

UPDATE: Here's an even better explanation in a CERN rap video.

2 Comments so far      

Anonymous Anonymous:

The rap video is cool for sure! I look forward to the day when we have our own ISRO Rap.

And thanks to the Logo change on Google, even more people get to know the LHC. Which is a good thing in case the world ends.

At least we'll die educated. Otherwise how many people are really interested in particle physics...

10 September 2008 at 15:28:00 GMT+5:30 link  
Blogger Manu Sharma:

Thanks Saad...Google's LHC logo is awesome.

10 September 2008 at 17:37:00 GMT+5:30 link  

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