Its the end of the world? Not really, I think

Today’s topic at our office water-cooler(or at our gigantic, old and rusty coffee-machine)  is the Large Hadron Collider(LHC). From the news articles I’ve been reading and from my costly undergrad and masters degrees in science related topics, I have come to understand that it is going to be ‘turned on’ (yes, I believe that’s the official term for it – ask Dubya if you don’t believe me ) this Wednesday. It seems like half the scientific community thinks of this as the ultimate Diwali (or Christmas) gift and are rubbing their hands in glee while the rest are busy reassuring the public that we are not going to disappear after Wednesday. And like any good science debate, death threats have been duly issued to the right people. If any of this hasn’t convinced you yet about how ‘cool’ this event is, you have to watch the rap video on YouTube about it. That’s when you know this thing is huge.

Talking about huge, going by the BBC website, it has taken hundreds or thousands (depending on whose counting I suppose )  scientists in over 40 countries working together for about 14 years to come up with this. Everything about this collider seems truly collossal like how long the tunnel is, how much cooling it needs – the temperature(-271 deg C) , amount of coolant, speed of the cameras that will capture what happens, its magnification factor etc..they are all impressive. What the LHC is essentially trying to do is this:

Inside the LHC vacuum pipe, two parallel beams of subatomic particles (protons or lead ions) would hurtle in opposite directions at record energies.

Crashing together at specially designated junctions, they would release unstable, high-energy particles – including, perhaps, the elusive Higgs Boson.

I am reminded of a joke about the Big Bang Theory – I’m not sure who said it first – it goes something like this – ‘First there was nothing and then it exploded’. But jokes apart, I’m excited to see what happens once it’s, erm… turned on. There is immense hope that what happens Wednesday will help scientists in understanding everything from cancer to climate research(link).  What I find most impressive is that all this effort is to basically find out what happened the first 7 seconds after the Big Bang happened. BTW, did the Big Bang happen before or after God said, ‘Let there be light’? Just curious.