CERN admits black hole

Last Updated (Wednesday, 31 March 2010 12:12) Saturday, 01 August 2009 03:56

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CERN admits black hole ripped in space!

Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.

Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.

The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.

At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one.

This time, however, their ridicule has been rather muted — because the time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.

What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.

What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.

This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.

Nielsen’s idea has been likened to that of a man travelling back through time and killing his own grandfather. “Our theory suggests that any machine trying to make the Higgs shall have bad luck,” he said.

“It is based on mathematics, but you could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”

His warnings come at a sensitive time for Cern, which is about to make its second attempt to fire up the LHC. The idea is to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light around the machine’s 17-mile underground circular racetrack and then smash them together.

In theory the machine will create tiny replicas of the primordial “big bang” fireball thought to have marked the creation of the universe. But if Nielsen and Ninomiya are right, this latest build-up will inevitably get nowhere, as will those that come after — until eventually Cern abandons the idea altogether.

This is, of course, far from being the first science scare linked to the LHC. Over the years it has been the target of protests, wild speculation and court injunctions.

Fiction writers have naturally seized on the subject. In Angels and Demons, Dan Brown sets out a diabolical plot in which the Vatican City is threatened with annihilation from a bomb based on antimatter stolen from Cern.

Blasphemy, a novel from Douglas Preston, the bestselling science-fiction author, draws on similar themes, with a story about a mad physicist who wants to use a particle accelerator to communicate with God. The physicist may be American and the machine located in America, rather than Switzerland, but the links are clear.

Even Five, the TV channel, has got in on the act by screening FlashForward, an American series based on Robert Sawyer’s novel of the same name in which the start-up of the LHC causes the Earth’s population to black out for two minutes when they experience visions of their personal futures 21 years hence. This gives them a chance to change that future.

Scientists normally hate to see their ideas perverted and twisted by the ignorant, but in recent years many physicists have learnt to welcome the way the LHC has become a part of popular culture. Cern even encourages film-makers to use the machine as a backdrop for their productions, often without charging them.

Nielsen presents them with a dilemma. Should they treat his suggestions as fact or fiction? Most would like to dismiss him, but his status means they have to offer some kind of science-based rebuttal.

James Gillies, a trained physicist who heads Cern’s communications department, said Nielsen’s idea was an interesting theory “but we know it doesn’t happen in reality”.

He explained that if Nielsen’s predictions were correct then whatever was stopping the LHC would also be stopping high-energy rays hitting the atmosphere. Since scientists can directly detect many such rays, “Nielsen must be wrong”, said Gillies.

He and others also believe that although such ideas have an element of fun, they risk distracting attention from the far more amazing ideas that the LHC will tackle once it gets going.

The Higgs boson, for example, is thought to give all other matter its mass, without which gravity could not work. If the LHC found the Higgs, it would open the door to solving all kinds of other mysteries about the origins and nature of matter. Another line of research aims to detect dark matter, which is thought to comprise about a quarter of the universe’s mass, but made out of a kind of particle that has so far proven impossible to detect.

However, perhaps the weirdest of all Cern’s aspirations for the LHC is to investigate extra dimensions of space. This idea, known as string theory, suggests there are many more dimensions to space than the four we can perceive.

At present these other dimensions are hidden, but smashing protons together in the LHC could produce gravitational anomalies, effectively tiny black holes, that would reveal their existence.

Some physicists suggest that when billions of pounds have been spent on the kit to probe such ideas, there is little need to invent new ones about time travel and self-sabotage.

History shows, however, it is unwise to dismiss too quickly ideas that are initially seen as science fiction. Peter Smith, a science historian and author of Doomsday Men, which looks at the links between science and popular culture, points out that what started as science fiction has often become the inspiration for big discoveries.

“Even the original idea of the ‘atomic bomb’ actually came not from scientists but from H G Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free,” he said.

“A scientist named Leo Szilard read it in 1932 and it gave him the inspiration to work out how to start the nuclear chain reaction needed to build a bomb. So the atom bomb has some of its origins in literature, as well as research.”

Some of Cern’s leading researchers also take Nielsen at least a little seriously. Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at Manchester University, said: “His ideas are theoretically valid. What he is doing is playing around at the edge of our knowledge, which is a good thing.

“He is pointing out that we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we haven’t yet proved rigorously that sending information into the past isn’t possible.

“However, if time travellers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”

This weekend, as the interest in his theories continued to grow, Nielsen was sounding more cautious. “We are seriously proposing the idea, but it is an ambitious theory, that’s all,” he said. “We already know it is not very likely to be true. If the LHC actually succeeds in discovering the Higgs boson, I guess we will have to think again.”

UPDATE:

OK Are they saying they didnt know what they were talking about?

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was reopened, not two months ago, the high-energy physics community was excited that the largest scientific experiment on the planet was operational. Then came the milestone that everyone wanted to see, namely the fact that the machine became the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, exceeding Fermilab's Tevatron. Now, scientists with the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector have published the first results based on last December's proton collisions.

The thing that stands out, the BBC News reports, is that the collisions yielded a lot more subatomic particles than theoretical models had suggested. In a paper accompanying the finding, which was published in the current issue of the respected Journal of High Energy Physics, the experts write that the wealth of new particles should not hinder the operation of the giant collider even as it moves to higher energy levels. They add that the proton smasher collided particles at energy levels exceeding one trillion electron volts in December, which put it just little above the Fermilab. However, the LHC is running slowly, at barely a fraction of its potential capabilities.

“The level is somewhat higher than the most popular models had predicted, and it looks like it is going to increase with energy a little bit more steeply than we expected. I think it's not going to be a problem, but it is one of the many things that we need to know as we move toward searches for the most rare particles and new physics,” CMS collaborator and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist Roland Gunter told the British news agency.

The expert also added that the “extra” particles would become more of an issue for the teams managing the LHC's detectors once the accelerators began to conduct collision experiments with ions of lead, which is a significantly heavier element than what is currently in use. These events will most likely result in even larger numbers of these particles. “We'll know much more about that in two or three months when we look at the next higher energy of 7 TeV,” he added. This energy level will be achieved by the two beams running in opposite directions, each with an energy level of 3.5 TeV.



Compact Muon Solenoid What is that?

CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid: compact because it is “small” for its enormous weight, muon for one of the particles it detects, and solenoid for the coil inside its huge superconducting magnet. It is a high-energy physics experiment in Cessy, France, part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

CMS is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC. Like a cylindrical onion, different layers of detector stop and measure the different particles, and use this key data to build up a picture of events at the heart of the collision.

Scientists then use this data to search for new phenomena that will help to answer questions such as: What is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it? And what gives everything substance? CMS will also measure the properties of previously discovered particles with unprecedented precision, and be on the lookout for completely new, unpredicted phenomena.

Update  Tue, March 30 06:05 PM (ANI)

Reports indicate that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been dubbed the 'Big Bang Machine', has encountered some glitches in starting up its operations.

According to a report in The Telegraph, initial attempts on Tuesday were unsuccessful because problems developed with the beams, said scientists working on the massive machine.

That meant that the protons had to be "dumped" from the collider and new beams had to be injected.

"It's a very complicated machine and we have ups and downs," said Michael Barnett of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Right now we have a down," he added.

Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

The beams were pushed to 3.5 trillion electron volts in recent days, the highest energy achieved by any physics accelerator - some three times greater than the previous record.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is trying to use the powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles.

They could have been successful immediately, but such huge machines can be so tricky to run that it could take days.

When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology, describes the challenge of lining up the beams as being akin to "firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way."

He said that the problems on Tuesday started with a power supply that tripped and had to be reset.

The second time, the system designed to protect the machine shut it down.

"That was likely to have been a misreading by the system rather than any basic problem," said Barnett.

The Large Hadron Collider was launched with great fanfare on September 10, 2008, but it was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated, causing extensive damage to the massive magnets and other parts of the collider some 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground.

It cost 40 million dollars to repair and improve the machine so that it could be used again at the end of November.

Since then, the collider has performed almost flawlessly, giving scientists valuable data in the four-week run before Christmas.

(ANI)