Scientists at the world’s largest particle collider have fired the first protons into a 17-mile-long tunnel in science’s next great step to understand the makeup of the universe. India‘s contribution to the $10-billion effort in search of the universe’s missing matter by smashing particles like during the Big Bang is equally impressive. Around 200 of the 2,000 scientists doing the experiment are from India.
The 20-year project, under which the ‘Big Bang’ would be re-enacted to try to explain the birth of the universe and how it came to harbour life, is being dubbed by many as the mother of all scientific experiments ever conducted on earth.
While those behind the giant project are hoping to unravel the mysteries of universe, people like Prof Otto Rossler of the University of Tubingen say it will be nothing but an apocalypse.
A bid by Rossler and other naysayers of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment to get it blocked was rejected last week by the European Court of Human Rights.
Those afraid of the experiment believe it may lead to the creation of a black hole – an intense gravitational field sucking in everything including light.
According to Rossler, the experiment might lead to a scenario where the Earth will be sucked inside out "within four years of a mini-black hole forming". "It’s nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, the host European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Project leader Lyn Evans gave the go-ahead to send the protons into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border early Wednesday.The $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider was under construction since 2003. Scientists hope it will provide the necessary power to smash the components of atoms so that they can see how they are made.
The experiment: In a giant machine called the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN research centre straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the physicists plan to smash particles together to create, on a small-scale, re-enactments of the event that started up the cosmos. The LHC will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27 km (17 mile) tunnel where they will collide at close to the speed of light.
Computers will record what happens each time in these mini versions of the primeval fireball and the vast store of material gathered will be analysed by some 10,000 scientists around the globe for clues on what came next. Scientists at CERN, close to the foothills of the French Jura mountains, will pursue concepts such as "dark matter", "dark energy", extra dimensions and, most of all, the "Higgs Boson" believed to have made it all possible.
Cosmologists say the Big Bang occurred some 15 billion years ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in what was then a void, spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth. But the 10 billion Swiss franc (USD 9 billion) CERN project, begins with a relatively simple procedure: pumping a particle beam around the underground tunnel.
Technicians will first attempt to push the beam in one direction round the tightly-sealed collider, some 100 meters (yards) underground. Once they have done that — and CERN officials say there is no guarantee that success will come immediately or even in the first days — they will project a beam in the other direction.
And then, perhaps in the coming weeks, they will pump beams in both directions and smash the particles together — but initially at low intensity. Later, probably near the end of the year, they will move on to produce tiny collisions that will recreate the heat and energy of the Big Bang, a concept of the origin of the universe that now dominates scientific thinking.
The detectors will monitor the billions of particles that will emerge from the collisions, capturing on computer the way they come together, fly apart or just simply dissolve. It is in these conditions that scientists hope to find fairly quickly the Higgs Boson, named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964 as the answer to the mystery of how matter gains mass.
Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never have taken shape in the aeons after the Big Bang, and life could never have begun , on Earth or, if it exists as many cosmologists believe, on other worlds either.