The LHC; chances are you have an opinion on it one way or the other. For nerdy, scientist folks it's a cause for anticipated joy; for others, it's the latest doomsday device that will somehow spawn black-holes, alternate dimensions and pant-eating gnomes. But do people actually know what's going on? How much information does the average dude possess when it comes to the Large Hadron Collider? K, let's impart some knowledge here; -

The LHC

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is a particle accelerator. This means that it can take particles and spin them round and round 'til they gain speed. The LHC is capable of propelling particles to 99.9% the speed of light. That is fast; - seeing as (apparently) nothing can exceed the speed of light, that is pretty much as fast as anything but light can go.

Situated between France and Switzerland, the Collider is 27 kilometres in circumference, buried 50-150m below ground level and involves 10,000 scientists and engineers from 500 different academic institutions and many different countries.

Why?

The experiments conducted at the LHC will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang in order for us to have a sneaky peak at what it was really like and to give us a chance to hopefully observe some of the more scarce and theorised particles/acts of physics.

Questions that may be answered include; where did all the Dark Matter go? Why does gravity seem to be the weakest force? What don't we know about quarks? Did the Higgs Boson particle give everything in the universe mass and if so, how? Are there alternate dimensions like String Theory says?

Those scientists are a curious bunch.

How It Works

Two beams of particles (either protons or lead nuclei) will be injected into the huge machine and will travel in opposite directions. In order to keep these beams of particles focused, super-cooled magnets will be used. These magnets are so cold that at 1.9 Kelvins or -372 degrees Celsius they make it the coldest place on earth.

When the necessary speed is acquired, the two beams will be released into a chamber and allowed to smash into each other, releasing a bang of newly created particles, hopefully similar to the bang that occurred at the beginning of the universe (although no where near as powerful). As National Geographic put it – “That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.”

What’s this God Particle I’m hearing about?

First of all, many physicists aren’t really happy with the term ‘God Particle’ – you know, considering that it suggests a creator – but it sure does have a ring to it. The so-called God Particle is a theoretical element in science that hasn’t actually been seen before and this is where the LHC comes in; - named the Higgs Boson particle after the University of Edinburgh physicist, Peter Higgs, it is thought to have given everything in the universe mass.

The theory goes that just seconds after the big bang, nothing had mass at all. A few more seconds after the big bang and the Higgs Boson is though to have formed a field that swept over and attached itself to everything else thereby giving every other particle and atom a mass all of its own. But this raises another question; why do the mass of things differ? Why are some particles heavier than others?

Sucked into a Black Hole?

Despite the fact that there seems to be a lot of misinformed rumours flying about concerning doomsday, black-holes and alternate dimensions there seems to be little evidence for them. Many folks who don’t know very much about physics seem to latch onto buzz words and then let their imaginations run away with them, turning into wannabe fear-mongers. The chances of the LHC producing a black hole that will gobble us up in an instant are so remote that there’s the same chance of an army of malicious, face-eating gremlins springing into existence; - it’s not impossible but it’s very freaking improbable.

The sun’s rays have been hitting our atmosphere since we had an atmosphere with the same force and energy that the LHC will use and no black holes or gremlins have appeared. But if a black hole were to appear at the site of the collider, it would be so miniscule that we could actually laugh in its face and still live out our lives in peace a million times over; -

“Capturing 66,000 nucleons per second, how long will it take to get the black hole up to even one kilogram? Three trillion years, which is much longer than the lifetime of the Sun or even the age of the Universe. So even if you make a black hole, and even if the laws of physics that we know are wrong and it lives forever, it is still harmless. So the Earth will still be okay.” – Ethan Siegel, theoretical astrophysicist

So, there. I hope we cleared up some misconceptions here. Any questions?

PS. If you still think the world will end with the LHC, feel free to bet on it