10 September: The Large Hadron Collider

On this date in 2008 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history was first powered up in Geneva, Switzerland, 10 years ago today. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). CERN is perhaps most famous for its discovery in 2012 of the Higgs Boson (named after British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted its existence in 1964). It has been referred to as the ‘God particle,’ because it allows other particles to build up mass as they pass through its field.

1. It's the largest, most complex and most expensive machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and is an average of 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground. It took 10 years to build at a cost USD 4.1 billion.
2. This massive machine was built to study the smallest things known to science, sub-atomic particles, aiming to smash them together to see what happens, and potentially find something even smaller. Hadrons are composite particles composed of quarks held together by a strong force. They include protons, neutrons, and mesons.
3. It's the world's largest Fridge. It contains magnets which are pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen and then the temperature is brought down even more, to -271.3°C (1.9 K) using liquid Helium.
4. At the other extreme, when particles collide, (600 million times a second) they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
5. Particles travel around the HRC at 671,000,000 mph or 99.9999991% of the speed of light.
6. There is more iron in the system of magnets in the HRC than there is in the Eiffel Tower. It also contains superconducting filaments of niobium–titanium about 0.007 mm thick, about 10 times thinner than a human hair. There is enough of this filament to stretch to the Sun and back six times with enough left over for about 150 trips to the Moon.
7. Talking of the Moon, the energy of the proton beam is influenced by the Moon so that tidal variations have to be taken into account when the machine is operated.
8. Built to research the building blocks of the universe and to find out about dark matter and dark energy, Sergio Bertolucci, former Director for Research and Scientific Computing of the facility was reported as saying it could open doors to other dimensions and possibly time travel. Could this mean beings from other time-space dimensions might come and visit us? These portals, Bertolucci said, would only exist for a fraction of a second so it's unlikely. Some say the HRC could produce Black Holes – but they'd be tiny, microscopic ones.
9. The LHC is the emptiest place in the Solar System. So the particles don't collide with anything other than each other the experiment has to take place in an ultra-high vacuum.
10. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day, of course. They will point out that the town in France where CERN is partially situated is called “Saint-Genus-Pouilly.” Pouilly comes from the Latin “Appolliacum” and it's believed there was once a temple to Apollo on the spot, which the residents of the time believed was the gateway to the underworld. They will go on to say that Revelations (9:1-2, 11), makes reference to the name ‘Apollyon': “To him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit…” They may also point out that CERN has chosen Shiva, Hindu goddess of destruction, as its mascot and has a statue of her outside its HQ. While these things might be dismissed as the ramblings of religious nuts, respected scientists like Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grasse Tyson warned of a possible catastrophe causing the planet to explode or space and time to collapse. Two CERN-commissioned safety reviews examined these concerns, noting that the physical conditions and collision events in the LHC occur naturally without hazardous consequences. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays impact Earth with energies far higher than those in the collider. So it's perfectly safe, they said. It's been running for ten years and we're all still here. So far.

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