Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Moment of Life: LHC





Travelling down the matrix of Science, the origin of universe is one of the most mysterious paradox challenging both the religious and scientific world. Among all the scientific research themes ever known in history, the most high profile status belongs to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a real life time machine. This brainchild was conceived by the creators of the World Wide Web, European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). This mysterious scientific project brings together the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, collaborating 10,000 of world's best scientific minds from hundreds of countries and universities across the globe.

A major share of the world population is unaware of the role of God played by these people with the tremendous potential to destroy our planet. This giant underground high energy particle accelerator is located at less than 0.2 kilometers under the French-Swiss border in Switzerland. capable of shooting and smashing beams of high energy quarks at the speed of light, along a 27 kilometers long circular tunnel of space. The basic objective being the creation of new mass from energy, with head-on collisions so violent that it resembles the conditions existed during the Big bang. The entire process is not fool proof and is obviously capable of converting our universe into a particle soup. I wonder if millions of years later there would be a Jurassic Park movie with aliens digging human bones.

''Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," is how Sergio Bertolucci, who is the Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN addressed the reporters during a press meet at the CERN HQ in 2009. The questions and doubts that would arise within the commonsense of a normal man doesn't bother the scientific community until the collider disaster actually spell its power. We might have to helplessly wait for the scientists to convince themselves about the real risk of playing god, until the creation of black holes that are capable of sucking the entire earth; and the generation of antimatter explosions that could burn our planet like the sun.

I might sound like an eccentric crack criticizing the new possibilities of science. For the time being, let us ignore the negative possibilities. But i wonder, if spending billions of money and homework just to solve some puzzles in physics do justice to humanity. This one is obviously different from any other scientific project in being gigantic in structure, expenditure and scientific manpower. Still what would be the fate of 27 kilometers long tunnel associated with thousands of powerful magnets, detectors, compressors and incubators weighing thousands of tonnes, after the so called dream collision. CERN has planned to run the collider with half energy until the shutdown by 2013, to prepare the magnets to be more stronger for the proposed high energy run starting by 2014. Let us keep our fingers crossed while the scientific community expects the creation of a new mystery or rather a doomsday for the future history.

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