WORLD> Europe
|
WORLD> Europe
|
|
CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-08 09:30 CERN's collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN. Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons, previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom, were made of still smaller quarks and gluons. CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman's terms. The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel, the ALICE, or "A Large Ion Collider Experiment", produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang. "We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other," Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN. "This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma." The soup cools quickly and the quarks and gluons stick together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter. That will enable scientists to look for still missing pieces to the puzzle, or lead to the formulation of a new theory on the makeup of matter. Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has produced the Large Hadron Rap, a video clip that has attracted more than a million views on YouTube. "The things that it discovers will rock you in the head," McAlpine raps as she dances in the tunnel and caverns. CERN spokesman James Gillies said the lyrics are "absolutely scientifically spot on." "It's quite brilliant," Gillies said. On the Net: CERN: http://www.cern.ch Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: http://www.fnal.gov The US at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/ Large Hadron Rap http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6aU-wFSqt0 |
