Akhilesh Kumar Singh | TNN
Jaipur: When, at 12.30 pm on Wednesday, a group of physicists turn on a machine that will recreate the birth of the universe, the Raniwala couple from Jaipur will be watching the experiment very closely.
Sudhir and Rashmi Raniwala, associate professors of physics at Rajasthan University (RU), are among the 30-odd physicists from India, who are part of what can be called the largest experiment in human history. At the heart of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was constructed at a cost of £4.4 billion. It is the latest in a series of successively more powerful particle accelerators that have been built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva.
Within the LHC’s circular tunnel, 27 km in circumference, beams of protons will be accelerated to up to 99.999999% of the speed of light. When they smash together, they will generate concentrations of energy resembling those that occurred during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. “We have designed the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which has been fitted in the LHC, in which small particles (protons) will be accelerated and made to collide at the highest-ever man-made speed,” Sudhir said. The PMD was developed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata.
To give you an idea, everything that you see around you, including yourself, can be reduced to atoms, which can further be broken up into neutrons, protons and electrons. Neutrons and protons together form the nucleus of an atom. But what makes up neutrons and protons? That’s where quarks come into the picture. These are subatomic particles held together by gluons and form the nucleus of an atom. In nature, quarks are always found bound together in groups, and never in isolation, because of a phenomenon known as confinement. These groups of quarks are called hadrons. When beams of protons smash together at almost the speed of light there will be such a high concentration of energy that a form of matter called quarkgluon plasma will be created. In this phase, for a brief period of time, a large number of free quarks and gluons can exist. That was how things were just after the Big Bang.
Orissa panics on ‘penultimate’ day
Bhubaneswar: With some channels flashing news that the world will come to an end on Wednesday because of a scientific experiment triggered panic among people in Bhubaneswar. While some visited temples, others bunked work to spend the “penultimate” day with near and dear ones. The capital city also witnessed a mad rush in non-vegetarian restaurants and sweet shops. TNN
BIG BANG ON EARTH TODAY Physicists To Recreate Cosmic Phenomenon In Hope Of Finding How Universe Began
Geneva: Scientists at a vast underground Swiss laboratory will launch an experiment on Wednesday to re-enact the “Big Bang” on a small scale to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbour life.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km tunnel where they will smash together near the speed of light. Computers will analyze particles given off for clues to what happened at the Big Bang.
Scientists at the CERN laboratory, near the foothills of the Jura mountains, will pursue long elusive concepts such as “dark matter”, “dark energy”, extra dimensions and, most of all, the “Higgs Boson” believed to have made it all possible.
“The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the universe,” said CERN’s French directorgeneral Robert Aymar. “Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind’s understanding of our world’s origins will be greatly enriched.”
CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.
The experiment is projected to restage trillions of times the moment some 15 billion years ago when, as cosmologists believe, an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded, expanding rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.
The 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) effort at CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research on the edge of Geneva, begins with a relatively simple procedure: The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets.
It will still be about a month before beams travelling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some sceptics fear could create micro “black holes” and endanger the planet.
The experiment is not without its detractors. Websites on the internet, itself created at CERN in the early 1990s as a means of passing particle research results to scientists around the globe, have been inundated with claims that the LHC will create black holes sucking in the planet.
“Nonsense,” say the most trenchant of CERN scientists, who, with colleagues in the US and Russia issued a detailed report last weekend arguing that such a disaster was out of the question.
“The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction,” said Aymar in a comment on the report. British physicist Brian Cox said the “end of the world” ideas were “nonsense…. spread by conspiracy theorists.” REUTERS
THE EXPERIMENT The Large Hadron Collider will smash together energy particles near the speed of light to get clues to what happened at the Big Bang
THE CONTROVERSY Scientists say there’s a chance that the LHC could create microscopic black holes. They hasten to add that the tiny singularities will instantly pop out of existence
GOD’S PARTICLE The LHC should confirm whether Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle which is thought to give matter its mass and is also known as the “God particle”, exists
Sudhir and Rashmi Raniwala, associate professors of physics at Rajasthan University (RU), are among the 30-odd physicists from India, who are part of what can be called the largest experiment in human history. At the heart of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was constructed at a cost of £4.4 billion. It is the latest in a series of successively more powerful particle accelerators that have been built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Geneva.
Within the LHC’s circular tunnel, 27 km in circumference, beams of protons will be accelerated to up to 99.999999% of the speed of light. When they smash together, they will generate concentrations of energy resembling those that occurred during the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. “We have designed the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which has been fitted in the LHC, in which small particles (protons) will be accelerated and made to collide at the highest-ever man-made speed,” Sudhir said. The PMD was developed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata.
To give you an idea, everything that you see around you, including yourself, can be reduced to atoms, which can further be broken up into neutrons, protons and electrons. Neutrons and protons together form the nucleus of an atom. But what makes up neutrons and protons? That’s where quarks come into the picture. These are subatomic particles held together by gluons and form the nucleus of an atom. In nature, quarks are always found bound together in groups, and never in isolation, because of a phenomenon known as confinement. These groups of quarks are called hadrons. When beams of protons smash together at almost the speed of light there will be such a high concentration of energy that a form of matter called quarkgluon plasma will be created. In this phase, for a brief period of time, a large number of free quarks and gluons can exist. That was how things were just after the Big Bang.
Orissa panics on ‘penultimate’ day
Bhubaneswar: With some channels flashing news that the world will come to an end on Wednesday because of a scientific experiment triggered panic among people in Bhubaneswar. While some visited temples, others bunked work to spend the “penultimate” day with near and dear ones. The capital city also witnessed a mad rush in non-vegetarian restaurants and sweet shops. TNN
BIG BANG ON EARTH TODAY Physicists To Recreate Cosmic Phenomenon In Hope Of Finding How Universe Began
Geneva: Scientists at a vast underground Swiss laboratory will launch an experiment on Wednesday to re-enact the “Big Bang” on a small scale to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbour life.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km tunnel where they will smash together near the speed of light. Computers will analyze particles given off for clues to what happened at the Big Bang.
Scientists at the CERN laboratory, near the foothills of the Jura mountains, will pursue long elusive concepts such as “dark matter”, “dark energy”, extra dimensions and, most of all, the “Higgs Boson” believed to have made it all possible.
“The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the universe,” said CERN’s French directorgeneral Robert Aymar. “Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind’s understanding of our world’s origins will be greatly enriched.”
CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.
The experiment is projected to restage trillions of times the moment some 15 billion years ago when, as cosmologists believe, an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded, expanding rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.
The 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) effort at CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research on the edge of Geneva, begins with a relatively simple procedure: The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world’s largest superconducting magnets.
It will still be about a month before beams travelling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some sceptics fear could create micro “black holes” and endanger the planet.
The experiment is not without its detractors. Websites on the internet, itself created at CERN in the early 1990s as a means of passing particle research results to scientists around the globe, have been inundated with claims that the LHC will create black holes sucking in the planet.
“Nonsense,” say the most trenchant of CERN scientists, who, with colleagues in the US and Russia issued a detailed report last weekend arguing that such a disaster was out of the question.
“The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction,” said Aymar in a comment on the report. British physicist Brian Cox said the “end of the world” ideas were “nonsense…. spread by conspiracy theorists.” REUTERS
THE EXPERIMENT The Large Hadron Collider will smash together energy particles near the speed of light to get clues to what happened at the Big Bang
THE CONTROVERSY Scientists say there’s a chance that the LHC could create microscopic black holes. They hasten to add that the tiny singularities will instantly pop out of existence
GOD’S PARTICLE The LHC should confirm whether Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle which is thought to give matter its mass and is also known as the “God particle”, exists
Rajasthan University profs Sudhir and Rashmi Raniwala, along with 30 Indian physicists, have designed equipment for Wednesday’s experiment to recreate the birth of the universe
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