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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and hadron collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to its final operating temperature of ~4 K (-269 °C). The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

Never heard of "traversable wormholes?"
Well, soon you might start hearing about them, as the world's most powerful particle accelerator becomes functional this spring - unleashing forces, capable of distorting not only space (just like gravity distorts space around Earth), but also TIME.


To better appreciate the enormous scale of this beast, consider that it runs 17 miles across the border of two countries, has detectors in four locations the size of buildings, housed in huge caverns - and if you happen to be inside the tunnel while this thing is in operation, you would have a highly radioactive - and fatal - experience.



Just one superconducting solenoid (CMS) contains in it more iron than the Eiffel Tower. The cost of building LHC is so high, that America had to put a stop to its own Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 (even though 14 miles of tunnel had already been dug in Texas), so today CERN's structure is the lone contender for the title "the most complicated thing that humans have ever built".


The idea is to focus all this incredible energy into the smallest space possible. As they say, "the more energy goes in, the more massive the particles that come out". How massive? How about a miniature black hole?


Here are some quick facts:
- 20-year work-in-progress
- A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations
- 27 kilometers in circumference, 175 meters underground
- facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light
- each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
- temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core
- superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space

Two proton beams travel in opposite directions and collide at four points along the way - replicating the Big Bang conditions of "cosmic plasma", a mysterious almost liquid state, which occurred before quarks had cooled off enough to allow atoms to form together. The Large Hadron Collider will force quarks to break free of their bonds, the matter substance to unravel - to recreate the original "cosmic plasma", and to reconstruct Big Bang conditions. (hopefully on a much smaller scale)



CERN scientists know what they talk about, and we can trust them - after all, last time they needed something for sharing collider data, they invented the World Wide Web! According to some sources, even now one THIRD of ALL internet traffic flows thru this facility in CERN's computing center (one of the three main hubs for world wide web)

"The collisions at LHC could spray out strange new kinds of matter, unfurl hidden dimensions of space, even generate tiny glowing reenactments of the birth of the universe." And now, as we have seen - it may even facilitate time travel.

"We don’t even know what to expect," says French physicist Yves Schutz. "We’re now in a domain of energy that nobody has ever explored."

Time Machine: CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider

Contrary to the somewhat feverish claims laid out in an recent lawsuit, when our favorite particle-smashing, Force-finding Large Hadron Collider is switched on soon it will not result in the destruction of life as we know it. Such claims are "complete nonsense" say the scientists at CERN (and everywhere else,) in response to the suit. They should know: it's their machine, they designed it and they've been telling everyone for a while that their research shows it's safe.

The lawsuit filed by a group of Hawaii residents is alleging that not enough safety checks have been made by CERN to prevent disaster when the LHC goes live in the coming weeks. It may "create unsafe conditions of physics" which may have disastrous effects. How? Well, you may imagine a micro black hole gobbling up everything unstoppably, while a strangelet (a hypothetical clump of particles including strange quarks) may run amok converting all nearby matter into strange matter, also wrecking the Earth.

James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, suggests this is rubbish in this response to the New Scientist: "The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe." It's no threat at all, he says: "A year from now, the world will still be here." The LHC is actually designed to probe the boundaries of physics, and while a 2003 safety study did conceed that micro black holes or magnetic monopoles may be formed, they would be short-lived and offer no threat.

CERN physicists will be talking about safety in an open house discussion on April 6.

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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.