Good Year For Science

People might not know this, but later this month one of the most important events in the history of physics will be taking place. The Large Hadron Collider, A.K.A The LHC for short. This machine has been 20 years in the making, and on September 10th it goes live. What does it do? Well, its kind of attempting to re-create the conditions that were present at the very beginings of our universe, or at least a few miliseconds after its conception. The machine is a massive partical accelorator, more specifically a 'hadron' accelorator. Once active, these particels will be blasted at almost the speed of light around a 27 kilomoter circumference into eachother. The outcomes of such a collision are numerous. Firstly, and most importantly, the aim of this massive experiment is to give credence to the existence of a subatomic particle called the 'Higgs Boson'. So one outcome would basically be the discovery of a new particle, thus unifying the standard model(theory of how everything interacts), with special relativity(einstein) and quantum mechanics. One of the major flaws of the standard model being its exclusion of gravity in its calculations and predictions.

Whats the point? A theory of absoloutly everything. Thats the point. Once we gain a better understanding of the origins and evolution of our universe we can then begin to explain in greater detail why and how everything works.

BBC are gonna be running a Big Bang Day on the day that the machine goes live, and the other day they done a show on BBC 4 that kinda explained a little bit about the history of the whole thing. (For anyone whos interested u can catch that show here at BBC iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dccnr/ for a limited time only.)

It has been speculated by certain physicists that the collision of the two ultra high speed particles may cause a black hole to form. But to be honest, the likely hood of such an even happenin is so small and insignificant that there realy isnt any reason to worry about our bit of the universe being sucked into a little hole somewhere in switzerland. Would be kinda exciting if one does appear tho...

Just a few pics I managed to find on the net:

As i said, its gonna be a good year for science.