This Machine Is the Future of Physics

More on the world's greatest experiment in physics!

By Alexis Madrigal
09.10.08

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most-powerful atom smasher, is an engineering marvel constructed hundreds of feet underground.

Composed of millions of individual pieces, the collider uses more than 9,000 magnets to accelerate two beams of protons to almost the speed of light. When the beams collide, they shatter into their constituent parts, allowing scientists to glimpse particles that don't exist in standard environments.

The hard part, actually, becomes finding the rare and important particles among all the normal ones created in smashing atoms. Toward that end, physicists designed cathedral-size experimental chambers that feature some of the most-precise measurement tools ever created by man. One scientist described them as 150-megapixel digital cameras taking snapshots 600 million times a second.

In this gallery, we take you on a quick tour of the world's most complex scientific machine.

The Globe of Science and Innovation marks the site of the 17-square-mile underground Large Hadron Collider, the biggest physics experiment in the world, which starts smashing atoms ON Sept. 10 2008. (Photo: BUL Collection)


The Globe of Innovation at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. CERN has 20 European members and 7,931 scientists and engineers.( Photo: CERN)

Taken inside ATLAS, this image shows the Hadronic Endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The calorimeter can measure the loss of energy from a collision, which could be caused by the creation of dark matteR. (Photo: Roy Langstaff)

The ALICE detector, a piece of which is pictured here, will be used in experiments designed to mimic the moments just after the Big Bang. Cosmologists hope to see how the superheated plasma present at the beginning of creation cooled into the particles we see in the world today. More than 1,000 scientists have collaborated on the ALICE experiment.(Photo: Maximilien Brice).

The ATLAS experimental chamber, pictured here, is 150-feet long, 82-feet high and weighs more than 15,000 pounds. It's the largest detector at the LHC and the handiwork of more than 1,700 scientists.(Photo: Claudia Marcelloni)

Unlike most of the other experiments at the LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid was built above ground and then lowered into place in 15 sections. Here, the last section is brought into place for reassembly underground.(Photo: Maximilien Brice)

One of the final pieces is inserted into the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of the largest detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. Built around an enormous solenoid magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times that of the Earth, the CMS will be in on the hunt for the Higgs boson, dark matter and extra dimensions. More than 2,000 scientists from 37 countries will work with the CMS.(Photo: Maximilien Brice)

The Guardian newspaper once wrote, "Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable." Here, we see the unbelievable ATLAS Magnet Toroid Endcap rolling through the streets of the LHC campus. The Endcap is one of three major magnets in the detector's system. (Photo: Claudia Marcelloni)

Here, a technician works on one of the major experimental areas within the Large Hadron Collider: the ATLAS all-purpose particle detector. ATLAS will be used to search for the long-postulated Higgs boson as well as for clues about dark matter and the nature of the universe.(Photo: Roy Langstaff)

The Silicon Pixel detector, pictured under construction, of the ALICE detector recorded the very first particle tracks produced by the LHC back on June 15 during a test run of the machine.(Photo: Maximilien Brice)

Scientists watch the second and final test of the LHC's beam-synchronization systems on Aug. 22.(Photo: Maximilien Brice)

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, which goes by its French acronym, CERN, is home of the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border between Switzerland and France northwest of Geneva.(Courtesy CERN)

Scientists Start World's Biggest Physics Project

I find this piece of news to be truly incredible - sheer advancement in science! If man could actually prove the reality of the 'big bang' theory and thereby confirm the origin of the universe, what next? Will religion be affected? ......

Scientists Start World's Biggest Physics Project:
(D Ravi Kanth / Geneva September 11, 2008, 5:14 IST)
(Business Standard)

Experiments using the Large Hadron Collider could unlock secrets about the universe and its origins. Scientists and engineers today celebrated the successful steering of a beam of protons around a 27-km tunnel that houses the world’s largest collider at the European Nuclear Research Organization situated on the Geneva-France countryside, paving the way for a series of scientific experiments to reveal the early building blocks in the formation of the universe.

“There it is,” Lyn Evans, the leader of Large Hadron Collider project, declared proudly when two white dots of proton beam flashed on the computer screen, amid exultant scenes of triumph in crossing the first step of what is going to be the mother of all experiments in the arena of particle physics.

“It is a fantastic moment,” said Evans, the former British military commander. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”

It required a Herculean effort to ensure that thousands of individual elements that went into the construction of the largest particle collider work in harmony and timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, said Dr Vinod Chohan, leader of CERN-India collaboration division.

India’s scientific and engineering personnel played a significant role in the construction of the LHC project, especially in providing 1,706 assemblies of cryomagnets that are essential for acceleration functions in the LHC. “Testing and qualification of the magnets at cryogenic temperature is a prerequisite for the installation of the Large Hadron Collider,” said Dr Chohan, suggesting that the Indian assistance is invaluable.

“We are in an era where Indian physicists are full-fledged members of the LHC experiment,” said Chohan, the Indian-origin British physicist.

“It has been a fascinating and rewarding experience for us,” said Vinod C Sahni, director of the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore. “Overall, Indian contribution to LHC accelerator is Swiss Franc 43 million (about $42.5 million) containing a variety of components and systems besides skilled manpower support for magnetic tests and measurements and help in commissioning LHC subsystems.”

Today’s experiment is a first step to ensure that the proton beams are captured and retained well in heavy magnetic fields that dominate the tunnel. After several experiments of steering the beams both in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions, the ground will be prepared for the collision of protons in the coming months. “The collision and subsequent experiments will reveal the moment when the first building blocks of the universe began to take shape after the big bang,” he argued. “The LHC is a discovery machine,” said CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar, “Its research programme has the potential to change our view of the universe profoundly.”

Once the machine’s acceleration systems are brought into play to create conditions of 7,000 GeV, a measure for huge energy that will be generated, and the conditions of collision will be created, scientists will study the four experiments that are being carried out. The LHC, which is estimated at about $9 billion and has attracted researchers from around 80 countries, will provide ideal conditions for a collision of proton particles at the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

The CERN’s four experiments are expected to throw more light on “dark matter”, antimatter and other dimensions. The CMS experiment will provide evidence of the Higgs Boson, which is referred to as the God’s particle, that provides mass to all other particles, and thus to the matter that makes up the universe. According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

The universe is made up of 4 per cent ordinary matter, 23 per cent dark matter and 73 per cent dark energy. The LHC is expected to throw light on this mysterious stuff called the dark matter and dark energy.

Big bang effort:

Following are some facts about the Big Bang and CERN’s particle-smashing experiment:

WHAT IS CERN:
CERN, the European Organisation 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
Founded in 1954, CERN now has 20 member states, plus six actively participant observers including the United States and Russia

WHAT IS THE BIG BANG?
The name “Big Bang” was coined in 1949 by British scientist Fred Hoyle. It says the universe expanded rapidly from a highly compressed primordial state, which resulted in a significant decrease in density and temperature
It is the only explanation of an expanding universe, which shows how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed

RECREATING THE BIG BANG:
The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project's accelerator into the 27-km beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter-clockwise around it for about 3 km
The collider aims to simulate conditions milliseconds after the “Big Bang”, which created the universe around 13.7 billion years ago.
The collisions, in which both particle clusters will be travelling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible.

What Is Therapeutic Cloning?

BBC NEWS
Q&A: Therapeutic cloning
For the second time, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has given the go-ahead for a team of British scientists to clone human embryos.

BBC News Online examines the implications of the case.

Cloning could tackle disease

What are the scientists hoping to do?

Professor Ian Wilmut and a team at Kings College in London will clone early stage embryos to study a condition called motor neurone disease (MND).

What is MND?

MND is caused by the death of cells - called motor neurones - that control movement in the brain and spinal cord.

It affects about 5,000 people in the UK. Half of people with MND die within 14 months of diagnosis.

Weakness in the muscles that supply the face and throat also cause problems with speech and difficulty chewing and swallowing.

What will the research involve?

The team are investigating a cloning technique called cell nuclear replacement (CNR), in which the nucleus of a human egg cell is removed and replaced with the nucleus from a human body cell, such as a skin cell.

The replacement nucleus will come from patients with MND so the embryo also has MND.

The egg would then be stimulated to develop into an embryo.

The embryo would be allowed to develop for around six days, until it was at the blastocyst stage, before being destroyed.

What is the point of the research?

By cloning cells from MND patients, the researchers will be able to see how the illness develops in an embryo.

They would remove cells from the embryo while it was still in the earliest stages of development, before destroying it.

How is this different from earlier cloning research?

Up until now, scientists have wanted to create cloned embryos to see if they can be grown into tissues to repair damaged body parts.

Experts at the University of Newcastle, who were the first to be given the go-ahead by the HFEA, have been investigating new treatments for conditions including diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

Could it be done a different way?

Cloning opponents have said scientists should look for alternative ways to investigate MND, such as studying embryos that have been rejected from IVF use because they carry an inherited disease.

But Professor Peter Braude, from the Centre for Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis at King's College, London, said: "Unlike other genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, for which stem cell lines have already been created from affected embryos following preimplantation genetic diagnosis, there is no other way of producing a motor neurone stem cell line other than using cloning techniques."

Is it legal?

Yes. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority decided to make "therapeutic" cloning legal in 2001.

This means that scientists can apply for a licence to clone human embryos provided they intend to use them to study disease in a laboratory situation only.

The cloning of human embryos with the intention of creating a baby - reproductive cloning - is still strictly banned in the UK.

Embryos used for research must be destroyed when the work is finished. At this stage, they are still in an early stage of development, a bundle of several hundred cells.

It is controversial?

Yes. Opponents say an embryo, regardless of its stage of development, is still potentially a human being in the making.

Others question the potential benefits of the work.

A spokesman from Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) said: "Human cloning remains dangerous, undesirable and unnecessary."

But proponents argue that experimentation takes place long before an embryo begins to develop any nervous system, or sense of self - and as such cannot be defined as a human life.

They argue that the work is vital if effective treatments are to be found for debilitating diseases.

Have other scientists created cloned human embryos?

Yes. A South Korean team announced earlier this year that they had 30 embryos that were the exact genetic copies of the women who donated the eggs and cells to make them.

The embryos were allowed to develop for several days, and embryonic stem cells were extracted from them.

The eventual aim, in this case, is to use such cells to replace those that have failed in patients with degenerative diseases, such as some heart conditions and Parkinson's, or in spinal cord injuries.

Published: 2005/02/08 09:13:56 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

The Human Cloning Milestones!

Will the future humans be just redesigned, reengineeed genetic copies and mass produced on a production line?? Will this be happening in the very near future? It's like watching a science fiction movie except that...this is for REAL man! My mind boggles! .....


THE CLONING MILESTONES

As the most advanced human embryo clones yet are produced, BBC News Online looks back at some of the landmark moments since 1997, when British scientists unveiled the first successful mammal clone.

• 1997: Dolly the sheep and the big breakthrough - the first successful mammal clone from an ordinary adult cell.

• 1997 to 2000: Scientists at various institutes cloned various species of animal - as other scientists claimed to be working towards the first human clone.

• 1998: American Dr Richard Seed said he was ready to begin experiments on cloning a human being within the next three months.

• January 2001: Controversial Italian doctor Severino Antinori announced plans to clone human babies for infertile couples at his fertility clinic in Rome.

• April 2001: Dr Antinori reportedly said that a woman he was treating was pregnant with a cloned embryo. It was later denied.

• July 2002: Authorities in South Korea investigated a company's claim that it had implanted a cloned human embryo in a South Korean woman.

• November 2002: Dr Antinori announced that the first human baby clone would be born in January 2003.

• December 2002: Clonaid, founded by the Raelian sect, claimed the first human clone was born, sparking surprise and condemnation. It has never provided DNA proof of its cloning claims.

• February 2003: Dolly the sheep is put down after a veterinary examination showed she had a progressive lung disease.

• July 2003: The first UK research licence of its kind permitting a technique that creates embryonic stem cells from human eggs was granted to the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep in Edinburgh. This is therapeutic, not reproductive, cloning.

• September 2003: Dr Panos Zavos claims to have created the world's first cloned human embryo. He announced plans to implant the human embryo in a surrogate mother later in the year.

• October 2003: Scientists in China claimed they had created twins which effectively had two "genetic mothers" and one father, but the experiment did not create any live babies. One expert called the experiment "proof of principle" for human cloning, but others disagreed. The work was not aimed at producing genetic copies of humans.

• January 2004: Dr Zavos announces a 35-year-old woman is hoping to give birth to the world's first cloned baby.

• February 2004: South Korean scientists clone 30 human embryos and develop them over several days to a stage where special cells known as embryonic stem cells could be extracted. The researchers hope to obtain cells that could one day be used to treat disease.

There is controversy around human cloning

© BBC MMVIII