On this episode of Our Island Universe: The Large Hadron Collider and the promise of new discoveries in the near future.
Shanil Virani, Director of the John C. Wells Planetarium in Harrisonburg, VA.
Follow on Twitter as shanilv
Transcript:
Lying underneath Geneva, Switzerland lies a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 574 ft, that crosses the Franco-Swiss border. The LHC took 10 years to construct and was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. It remains the largest and most complex experimental facility ever built. After turning on in 2008, it would be 4 years until its biggest discovery would be announced. On July 4, 2012, physicists said that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks like the Higgs boson, a key missing ingredient that goes a long way to explaining why our Universe is the way it is and not some other way!
The Higgs boson discovered is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. An idea first suggested by physicist Peter Higgs from the University of Edinburgh in 1964 was finally confirmed. When the discovery was announced, the LHC was only operating at about 1/2 of its peak power. The newly revamped particle smasher, now 60% more powerful then before, turned back on in early April. It has taken a few months to rev up to maximum power, and once it does, what other mysteries of the Universe will it reveal?
Will we discover what Dark Matter is? Will we discover what Dark Energy is? Dark Matter and Dark Energy together make up ~96% of the Universe and we have no clue what they are! How do we combine Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — the two triumphs of 20th century physics? Stay tuned as we await what we will learn next from the giant collider.