Associated Press
GENEVA–When launched to great fanfare nearly a year ago, some feared the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole that would suck in the world. It turns out the collider itself may be the black hole.
The world's largest scientific machine, which some have nicknamed the Big Bang machine, has cost $10 billion, worked only nine days and has yet to smash an atom. The unique equipment in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel with cathedral-sized particle detectors deep beneath the Swiss-French border has been assembled by specialists in many countries, with 8,970 physicists eagerly awaiting the start-up.
But despite the expense, thousands of physicists around the world, many of whom hope to conduct experiments here, insist that it will work and that it is crucial to our understanding of the universe.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, said yesterday it would restart the collider in November at half power under pressure from scientists eager to conduct experiments.
But spokesman James Gillies told The Associated Press they would have to shut down yet again next year to finish repairs so that the collider can operate at full energy of 7 trillion electron volts – seven times higher than any other machine in the world.
CERN has been working since late last year to repair the damage caused by a faulty electrical joint. The breakdown occurred nine days after the spectacular start-up of the machine last Sept. 10 when beams of subatomic particles were sent around the accelerator in opposite directions.
Michio Kaku, a physics professor at City University of New York who is an outspoken critic of waste in big science projects, defends the CERN collider as a crucial investment.
"The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing," Kaku said. "We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe."
He said the biggest cause of the "bad accident" last year was "probably due to human error caused by rushing the project."
"But I view it as a temporary black eye. We'll get it up and running," Kaku said.
CERN expects repairs and additional safety systems to cost about 40 million Swiss francs ($37 million) over the course of several years, covered by the 20-nation organization's budget.
Scientists hope the fragments that come off the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe.
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