Big Bang-Literally

The original Big Bang was no bigger than a cent, yes quite literally. The whole story started when an object the size of a small coin exploded giving birth to this whole expanse of space, matter and dark matter. And unraveling the secrets of a coin lost in the universe 13.7 Billion years ago (give or take a few million years to accommodate scientific error) doesn't come cheap. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has spent at least 10 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider (dubbed-LHC), the world's biggest particle accelerator, under the Alps. Today at 12:30PM IST, CERN will start smashing particles together after having accelerated them to 99.9999991% of the speed of light (this took them a couple of months, if I am not wrong).

How is it done?
(From http://www.fastcompany.com/)

1. Two beams of protons are propelled in opposite directions around a 17-MILE CIRCULAR TUNNEL, located at least 165 feet beneath the French-Swiss border. Building subsurface meant lower costs (no need to buy up acres and acres of land) and a natural rock shield for the radiation produced by the LHC.

2. The particles will be guided around the tunnel by more than 1,600 super powerful, cylinder-shaped ELECTROMAGNETS, some of which weigh more than 30 tons. The protons will zoom around the ring up to 11,245 times per second, reaching 99.9999991% of the speed of light.

3. At four points in the ring, magnets will push the beams together, causing up to 600 million PROTON COLLISIONS per second. If all goes as planned, these high-speed, high-energy crashes will create bursts of rare forces and particles that haven't been seen since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.

4. Four huge PARTICLE DETECTORS -- the biggest, ATLAS, is 150 feet long, 82 feet high, and has more than 100 million sensors -- will track and measure the particles at each collision. Filters will discard all but the 100 most interesting crashes per second. This will still produce enough data to fill a 12-mile-high stack of CDs per year.

Then What?
The results will be analyzed by 100,000 processors and thousands of scientists around the world. CERN predicts that within a year they will be able to identify particles that had previously existed only in theory. Physicists will be hunting for the elusive Higgs boson, or "god particle," which is believed to imbue matter with mass. "We'll either find it," says CERN's James Gillies, "or prove that it doesn't exist." Particle physicists also hope to learn more about the composition of dark matter and dark energy -- the invisible stuff that makes up 96% of the universe. As well as shed some light on other mysteries like surpersymmetry. They also want to prove that science fiction is actually reality by finding evidence of extra dimensions beyond our 3-D world. I am hoping for singularity to be resolved (oh! well, but I do hope)

In lighter vein:
Some critics claim it will create "black holes" of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a "worm hole" in space-time. A safety review by scientists at Cern and in the US and Russia rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the research centre, said: "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."
Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, said: "Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth's atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens."

The Indian Connection:
(from Hindustan Times)
1. Over 100 Indian scientists from institutes like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Bhabha Atomic Energy Centre are involved in the Large Hardron Collider (LHC) project.

2. The Department of Atomic Energy gifted a two-metre bronze statue of the Nataraja to CERN on June 18, 2004 to celebrate the centre’s India connection.

3. Indian Atomic Energy Commission boss Anil Kakodkar had then said: “The Indian scientific community is part of the quest for understanding the universe.”

4. India contributed $25million as funds towards this experiment. Now, that is what is called a proud moment for India.

5. Author Fritjof Capra first drew a parallel between Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction and the dance of subatomic particles in The Tao of Physics.

6. A plaque next to the statue quotes Capra: “Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists... Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.”Image Source:
http://www.fastcompany.com/