can anyone explain to me in simple, laymans terms exactly what this is about. I know that they are trying to create "the big bang" but I really dont understand the science behind it.
Any help on this one will be much appriciated as my kids have been asking questions and I dont know how to answer them.
tia...
wizard66 Sun 07/09/08 20:56
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All the subatomic particles in the universe are made up of 16 from what is called the standard model. All the protons and neutrons and all the more exotic ones just come from 16.
Unfortunately the standard model says nothing should have any mass.
This problem was solved by (amoungst others) a guy called Peter Higgs.
His solution requires a field with an associated particle. To prove that this is right we need to find the Higgs particle.
We can't find one in nature so we have to make one and we know roughly how hard we have to hit things together to do that - very hard - hence the LHC.
The last time the whole Universe was that hot was at the big bang but these energies do exist in nature Cosmic rays hit our atmosphere much harder than this all the time but we can't winch 1,000 tonnes of scientific gubbins up there to measure it.
All the black hole stuff is really just the theoretical physicist's "Christmas list" they're pretty unlikely and even if they do exist will be so small they'll have almost no graitational force so you can forget all the Earth gobbling- black hole distroys the universe stuff!
As they say in the hitch hikers guide to the Universe "The secret is to bang the rocks together guys!"
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Question Author
Thanks jake, I'm afraid that I'll just have to remain an ignoramous regarding science...
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I'll try and remove some of the details jake put in.
There exist little sub-atomic particles, that everything is made from. Little small bits of stuff.
You can combine some of them in certain ways (or rather, nature combines them, usually), so that you make larger things. These little things are like bricks, and from bricks you can make houses. From these particles you can make atoms, and you can combine atoms to make molecules. From molecules you make the cells in your body, which make up tissues, which make up organs, which make up you, and all other living things.
Or you can chain lots of certain atoms together, and make metals.
So, by understanding the basic stuff better, we might be able to understand the larger, more complicated structures better. This is the reason for science after all -- better understanding. I'm sure you can see that it's a worthy cause. We might find a new way to join these little parts together or something, to make something new and useful.
The 'standard model' which jake talks about is a list of these little particles that everything is made from. They're given names like quarks and leptons. We've seen lots of them about in nature, by looking very close. But some we haven't seen. This table has some gaps in it, like a multiplication table with some gaps in it.
This is because some of the basic stuff is really unstable, and very soon after it's made, it decays and disappears again into other stuff.
If you were to take two snooker balls and fire them at each other, they'd break apart and you'd get lots of little fragments. But you'd have to fire them at each other hard enough, with enough power.
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The experiments at CERN, and other places like Fermilab, have been doing just that for years. But to smash these little particles together and have them break apart, they need even more power. So the LHC was created (using the same old tunnels as before actually), that should allow us to hit these small particles together even more powerfully than before.
And where you'd get fragments from a snooker ball, you'll get little particles from these small particles that we're smashing together. Some of them only last very short moments of time, so you have to analyse the data and watch really closely (like having a really fast-recording camera). Hopefully you'll see stuff that hasn't been seen before (because it needs even more power to see these little fragments).
One such particle they're looking to see is called the 'Higgs boson,' named after Mr. Higgs. But it's so small that it needs such a high amount of energy, that no other experiment has quite had the energy to see it. But hopefully the LHC will.
That's it in a nutshell anyway. Just doing the same old thing of hitting stuff together that they've been doing for years, but now more powerful than ever, so hopefully we'll see new things.
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That's right although there's a bit more to it than hopefully.
If we don't find the Higgs it won't be because we just need a more powerful accelerator it'll be because we're wrong about how things work.
In some senses that'd be even more exciting than finding it - there would be a lot more to find out and a lot more work to do.
Still after over 20 years of building it's about to go live - alas it will not be very visually exciting - no rockets and fuzzy TV pictures from millions of miles away.
It'll be a long time before the answer comes out but for some of us it's preddy heady stuff!
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Question Author
Thanks guys. Guess I'm just a scientific numpty...
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