Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Peter Venkman: Why?
Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
In November, CERN will flip the switch on the Large Hadron Collider and cross the streams. We’ve done this before, but not on this scale. The LHC is 7 times more powerful than it’s predecessor at Fermilab. The concept is simple. Two steams of protons will accelerate to almost the speed of light and smash together head on. This animation shows how it’s done.
The idea is to break the protons into pieces to see what they’re made of. Using this technique we have already observed 12 fundamental mass particles and 4 fundamental force mediating particles. With these more powerful collisions the main hope is to get a look at the fifth and most important force particle - the Higgs boson. In theory, it’s mass is so small that the previous colliders have not had enough energy to see it, but this one will.
That’s a big deal because Einstein had the insight that matter and energy are the same thing: e=mc2. The Higgs boson is the particle that’s thought to create mass from energy, the mechanism that “makes stuff, stuff.”
Here’s an overview of the LHC excerpted from BBH Horizon. The entire show is at Google Video and Stage6 (better quality):
7.5 minutes. Link to Video
The LHC was originally supposed to start up in late 2007, but it was already behind schedule when a support for one of the 43 foot long superconducting magnets lining the ring failed during a test. CERN hasn’t announced any revisions to the schedule yet.
Google Map with an overlay showing the ring
