Sep 10, 2008 10:40 pm US/Central
Good Question: Why Did Scientists Collide Protons?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―
Even if you're not into science, the Large Hadron Collidor, or LHC, is truly something else. It's 17 miles of underground tubing, where magnets 150,000 times stronger than the gravitational pull of the Earth will guide two protons directly into each other. Why?
"It's a really big deal," said Roger Rusack, Ph.D., a physics professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the 1,700-scientist team that helped design the LHC.
Rusack helped design and develop many components of the detector. In January 2009 he will take over leadership of a major part of the detector project, which is critical to gathering and analyzing the data that results from the proton collision.
"What we're doing is we're studying the physics of what happened in the first few microseconds after the big bang," said Rusack.
Scientists from around the world have converged at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where they have constructed the largest instrument in history to explore how things work at the most fundamental level. According to CERN, colliding two protons is like placing two needles six miles apart and then trying to fire them directly into each other.
Scientists in Switzerland celebrated Wednesday morning, when they were able to successfully navigate a proton beam completely around the 17-mile track. In the coming months, they plan to begin regularly conducting proton collisions.
"As we get more and more refined in the nature of our understanding of the nature of the universe, the questions get harder and harder," said Rusack. "What we're doing is probing back down to the time when the universe was a gas and there were extremely high energies."
Some have asked if a black hole could result, when scientists succeed in recreating the moments after the big bang. The fear is that a black hole would suck the contents of the Earth into it, ending life as we know it.
Rusack said those fears are unfounded.
"Every second the Earth and moon are being bombarded by high energy particles, coming from cosmic rays. We have been bombarded throughout the history of the universe. The moon is still here, we're still here, the sun is here," he explained.
The goal is to answer some of the biggest mysteries in physics. Where did matter come from? Why is there matter that we can't see?
Rusack said he's most excited to see if the experiment will result in some understanding of that so-called "dark matter". Scientists believe dark matter exists, but they've never been able to conclusively prove it and test it.
"We might actually be on the track of what this very strange, mysterious stuff which we call dark matter -- which we know for sure is definitely there. We may be on the point of making it in a laboratory where we can actually study it," he explained.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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