After 16 years and $10 billion -- and a long morning of electrical groaning and sweating -- there was joy in the meadows and tunnels of the Swiss-French countryside on March 30.
The world's biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider, finally began to make subatomic particles collide.
The success in producing proton collisions represents a remarkable comeback for CERN, but the lab is still only halfway back to where it wanted to be. Only a year and a half ago, the first attempt to start the collider ended with an explosion that left part of its tunnel enveloped in frigid helium gas and soot, when an electrical connection between two of the powerful magnets that steer the protons vaporized.
Now, after two false starts due to electrical failures, protons that were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva.
They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe.
The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the collider. Among their top goals are finding the identity of the dark matter that shapes the visible cosmos and the strange particle known as the Higgs boson, which is thought to imbue other particles with mass. Until now, these have been tantalizingly out of reach.
Learning Activity
Assign students to complete a report of at least 150 words (or choose a presentation of at least seven slides) that cites at least three resources. The report or presentation should address the following essential questions for critical thinking (you can add or substitute others):
Why is all this research on particle physics important enough for countries to invest billions of dollars?
What are some of the potential discoveries that scientists expect from these experiments?
What are some of the discoveries made in the past through the use of these physics machines?
How does this knowledge benefit the world in practical ways?
Research Pathfinder
Type "Large Hadron Collider" in the Basic Search box > Click Particle accelerators AND Atoms & subatomic particles
