The big bang
Tuesday 9 September 2008
What is happening at CERN that’s got everyone talking? n2k takes you through their new experiment.
What is CERN?
CERN is the European Council for Nuclear Research - the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.
It opened in 1954 in Switzerland. Its main function is to research high energy physics - things like research on matter and radiation.
Physics research is a big job and CERN hire around 2600 employees plus 8000 scientists and engineers!
Matter and more
Physics isn’t the only thing that CERN deal with – the lab also helped to develop the World Wide Web. It may seem impossible to imagine but there was once life without the internet!
The internet has been around since the 50s when scientists were using it for research, but they found that the network did not allow them to share information fast enough.
In 1989 CERN began a project called Enquire, which was lead by Sir Tim Berners Lee, a British computer scientist.
Berner’s worked on the idea of Hypertext, or text that links to other pages. He eventually created the first live website in 1991. By 1993, the World Wide Web became free and easily accessible. Check out one of the world’s first webpages.
Collider
One of the most important developments at CERN has been a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The idea behind the 17 mile long, £4.4 billion machine is to re-create the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang by flinging particles around at very high speeds.
Here's physicist Brian Cox talking about the collider.
What bang?
The Big Bang theory explains whatmay have happened at the very beginning of our universe over 13 billion years ago.
Our universe didn’t begin after a big explosion though - it just appeared as a very small, very hot and dense...thing!
Afterwards, it began to expand and cool to the universe that we know.
The big experiment
The LHC was built 300ft underground and fires atomic particles around the 17 mile area at an amazing 11,245 times per second, before the particles smash into each other.
During the big bang experiment, large detectors around the LHC will track and analyse over 600 million collisions and will send all the data to a special computer network called The Grid.
Opposition
A lot of critics have feared this experiment could create uncontrollable black holes – something which CERN say will not happen.
A black hole is something with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Scientists have already discovered areas around space that they believe are black holes due to their mass, density and the stars around it.
The LHCs official switch-on has been scheduled for September 10th. Critics have turned to the European Court for Human Rights to stop it as they are concerned about what might happen if the experiment produced black holes.
Will the world end?
No! Subatomic particles of greater energy, that make the LHC look puny in comparison, have rained down on Earth for the past billion years – but we’re still here!
If the LHC did produce any black holes, which is unlikely, they would be about the size of an atom – too small for the naked eye to see and too small to do any damage. They would also have little chance of lasting very long - the radiation they emit would cause the black holes to self destruct.
Exhibitions
Want to find out more? CERN's ‘Globe of Science and Innovation’, which opened in 2005, is used all the time for special exhibits.
There’s also the Microcosm Museum, where you can find out about CERN's aims, mock-ups of the different experiments the centre has carried out and original equipment from previous experiments!
