Here at Categorists, we are very much concerned with that which the brighter minds of this world do to occupy themselves. Each of us is majoring in, or have majored in sciences in college (Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, and last but not least, Political Science) and a project that I have personally kept close watch over is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This year, I have spent a great deal of time studying one of the building blocks of the physical world, quantum mechanics, only to find that there are numerous unexplained phenomenon. Apparently, a number of these answers are in the LHC.
Here is a quick synopsis of what CERN is and what the LHC does. CERN stands for Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, which translates to European Organization for Nuclear Research. It’s an international organization that leads the world in laboratory particle physics research. It is also the proud owner of the most badass particle accelerator to date: the Large Hadron Collider. It is 17 miles long and cost 7.5 billion Euros to construct. One of its main purposes is to discover the Higgs-Boson particle, which is pretty much the final missing link to the standard model of particle physics. Aside from that, it is theoretically capable of forming particles of infinite density and chain reaction properties (Strange Matter). To this day, the Higgs-Boson is still theoretical and the LHC has faced many experiments and complications since it’s induction in 2008. A large number of people believe that the experiments done at CERN could have catastrophic side effects, such as creating a black hole, here on Earth.
This year, CERN is beginning another set of experiments in hopes to getting that much closer to completing the Standard Model. Scientists at CERN have announced test dates for the rest of the year, as well as some curious dates can be found in the upcoming schedule. Starting Monday, December 17, 2012 and going through Friday, December 21, 2012, CERN will be launching and running a series of collisions, which are predicted to break records in high voltage collisions already set by the LHC. With these experiments, the scientists are hoping to create atomic reactions that would provide further information about anti-matter, and the big bang.
The test set for the week of December 17-21, 2012 is the final test before the LHC will shutdown operations for upgrades and will resume operation in 2014, assuming something doesn’t go wrong, in the minds of some of the scientists, terribly right, which causes the end of the world. I guess we will just have to see what happens. Let us know what you think, is CERNguilty of a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction here?
( via categorists.com)
