Most of us are aware that something extraordinarily BIG is happening inside a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) long tunnel on the Swiss-French border. We also know that a $10 billion dollar machine is smashing protons at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.
We can also try to appreciate that the detectors on a collider in the tunnel, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN*, will look for signs of new physics, including origins of mass and extra dimensions, hunt for the Higgs boson (dubbed “The God Particle” for its potential to answer the most basic questions about existence, such as how anything came into existence), investigate what happened to the “missing” anti-matter that was created in parallel with matter as well as attempt to study ’some kind of liquid’ that theoretically existed shortly after the Big Bang.
Anyways, I’m not here to talk physics or the origin of the universe nor to discuss whether this experiment will soon mean the ends of days (or nights) as we know them. With the media raising so much hue and cry about the ‘mega’ project, I wanted to dig in and find out, within the confines of my limited ability to envision, just how big this so-called Big Bang Experiment REALLY was.
Whatever it was that I expected to find out, I certainly was not ready to take THIS in:
| Be sure to CLICK on the thumbnails below (opens in new Window) |
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| Aerial view of CERN and the surrounding region of Switzerland and France . Three rings are visible, the smaller (at lower right) shows the underground position of the Proton Synchrotron, the middle ring is the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) with a circumference of 7 km and the largest ring (27 km) is that of the former Large Electron and Positron collider (LEP) accelerator with part of Lake Geneva in the background. (© CERN) |
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| The Globe of Innovation. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland ’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide. (Roy Langstaff, © CERN) |
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| ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN) will study the physics of ultrahigh-energy proton-proton and lead-lead collisions and will explore conditions in the first instants of the universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| View of the LHC cryo-magnet inside the tunnel. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Insertion of the tracker in the heart of the CMS detector. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1. (Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| View of the Computer Center during the installation of servers. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| Installation of the world’s largest silicon tracking detector in the CMS experiment. (Michael Hoch, © CERN) |
*The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), known as CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, situated in Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, established in 1954. The organization has twenty European member states, and is currently the workplace of about 2600 full-time employees, as well as some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities).
September 19th, 2008 at 5:25 am
That’s an amazing setup! Those pictures could make cool desktop wallpapers