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VISITING the Queensland Museum today, I was fortunate to see an impressive display of CERN's Large Hadrom Collider (LHC) well known to physicists, but made famous through the Dan Brown novel "Angels and Demons".
The LHC charges protons with up to 13 trillion electron volts accelerating the protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, increasing the mass of the proton by around 10,000 trillion times to around a millionth of a gram. They spin around the 27 kilometre circumference circular tunnel 11,100 times per second, passing four separate banks of seven detectors which generate data from the collisions. The resulting explosions are analysed to determine the subatomic particles and their properties. The most recent of these is the mysterious and elusive Higg's bosun discovered in 2012 as it decayed into two photons - the very subatomic particles photography is based on.
The museum display had all sorts of components from the LHC, no doubt failed components from the times the cores overheated. I thought it was really good of them to not throw away the old components, but to put them together in spectacular museum displays around the world to help raise funds to keep this multi-billion dollar science experiment going, so long as they don't accidentally create a black hole that would gobble up the entire Earth into an infinitessimal singularity.
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