LHC

In a break from postings on the Middle East, direct your attention to these photos of the Large Hadron Collider, being built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and soon to be the world's largest and most high-energy particle accelerator.







From an online article by John Ellis (CERN, Geneva) in Nature:

Particle physics stands on the brink of a new era. Research using the LHC will make the first exploration of physics in the TeV energy range. There are good reasons to hope that the LHC will find new physics beyond the standard model, but no guarantees. The most one can say for now is that the LHC has the potential to revolutionize particle physics, and that in a few years' time we should know what course this revolution will take. Will there be a Higgs boson, or not? Will space reveal new properties at small distances, such as extra dimensions or supersymmetry? Will experiments at the LHC cast light on some fundamental cosmological questions, such as the origin of matter or the nature of dark matter? Whatever the answers to these questions might be or whatever surprises the LHC might spring, it will surely set the agenda for the next steps in particle physics.

The New York Times has a special topic page in their Science section devoted to the LHC here. The LHC is exiting for two reasons: massive advances in our knowledge of particle physics; and ushering in the era of the self-autonomous robot apocalypse. Or we'll open a black hole in the Milky Way, rip the seams of the space-time continuum, and initiate the self-consumption of the known universe.