NYTimes/Valerio MezzanotiI certainly hope that Maxx returns from his comet trip in time to check this out. A Giant Takes on Physic's Biggest Questions.
The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics.BTW, U.S. scientist would be getting ready to answer those questions, but our congress cancelled the American project in 1993. Fuckers.
They are getting ready to see the universe born again.
Again and again and again — 30 million times a second, in fact.
Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.
Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.
Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then — relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago — will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the “Groundhog Day” movie. If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory.
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6 comments:
Maxx does have a wormhole gate in Geneva, right?
flory
Maxx will check it out and report back to his centaur, I'm sure of it.
It was a shame that project in Texas was killed but I understood why that happened. Big, ugly budget deficits needed to be fixed. Plus, it was in Texas, so it was a proper "screw you" to Bush 41 from Clinton. Think of it as payback for Bush sending US troops into Somalia and dropping that in Clinton's lap. IMHO, anyway.
When Dennis Overbye writes "Starting sometime next summer…." does he mean this summer, 2007? Or next summer, 2008?
This distinction seems often lost in writing these days. And Overbye may have written the article months ago.
I wouldn't expect to see this sort of article more than a year before these wondrous machines were to be turned on.
And thanks for the link. It's a lot of difficult info written understandably. Overbye is a good science writer.
The Large Hadron Collider was going to start up this summer but about a month ago they blew up some of their "plumbing" in test. (I think they need Max to look over their designs). The last thing I heard was they are going to try to start it up again this coming March.
Backyard Astronomer
Ahh, good to know.
It probably happened while Maxx was out on his comet.
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