The machine underground in Switzerland is the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. It is the largest ever manmade machine created throughout 16 years for which eight hundred crores of dollars have been invested. Involved in this largest ever experiment are 10,000 scientists from 50 nations including those from Calcutta’s Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre. The centre which is carrying out this experiment is popularly known as CERN, [Conseil EuropĂ©en pour la Recherche NuclĂ©aire] which is an EU organization that carries out research into high-energy particle physics, now called the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
Now let us have a closer look at the experiment with LHC which lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border between the Jura Mountains and the Alps near Geneva. The detectors in the LHC are also known as ‘matter microscope’ or the ‘time machine’. Within the LHC, a very minute portion of a millimetre place will be having hundreds of thousands time the temperature of the core of the sun.
Two streams of protons will collide at a place as small as 1/10,000,000,000,000,000
of a millimetre and, for a small period of time unimaginable heat and pressure
will be produced. Scientists at CERN are trying to create a situation as
similar as possible when the universe was created. It is estimated that a
fraction of a second after the universe was born; it was nearly the size of
today’s big bang which takes place after the collision.
Scientists
are eagerly waiting for the facts and answers that will surface up after the
explosion. The questions that are likely to be answered are as follows:Einstein showed that there are four dimensions. Three from space [left-right, front-back, up-down] and time [past-future]. What is the idea behind the fifth dimension?
Because of the earlier big bang there was created matter and anti-matter. Where did anti-matter disappear?
5% of the universe’s energy is known to man. What about the rest of 95%?
America’s Stanford Linear Accelerator’s scientist Joanne Hewitt remarked to one of the journalists that people couldn’t understand their excitement. Their condition is like children waiting for Christmas.
Is the Large Hadron Collider therefore their Santa Claus?
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