Experiment Underway to Recreate The Big Bang
Robert Evans, Reuters:
Tests have cleared the way for the start-up next month of an experiment to restage a mini-version underground of the “Big Bang” which created the universe 15 billion years ago. The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project’s accelerator into the 17-mile beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter-clockwise around it for about 2 miles. Earlier in the month a clockwise trial in the LHC had been equally successful, CERN said.
The LHC team now plans to send a full particle beam all the way around the collider pipe in one direction on September 10 as a prelude to sending beams in both directions and smashing them together later in the year. That collision, in which both particle clusters will be traveling 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.
The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the “Higgs boson” after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.
