Tuesday, April 7, 2015
What next for the Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been restarted after a two-year shutdown.
Physicists hope it could lead to discoveries that could potentially represent the biggest revolution in physics since Einstein's theories of relativity.
Among them is Prof Jordan Nash from Imperial College London, who is working on the CMS experiment at the LHC.
"We are opening a new window on the Universe and looking forward to seeing what's there," he said.
"As much as we have a lot of theories of what might be out there we don't know. We'd love to find something completely unexpected and we might, and that's the exciting bit."
Why are scientists doubling the LHC's energy?
They want a glimpse into a world never seen before. By smashing atoms harder than they have been smashed before physicists hope to peel back another veil of reality.
The aim of the various theories of physics is to explain how the Universe was formed and how the bits that make it up work.
One of the most successful of these theories is called the "Standard Model".
It explains how the world of the very, very small works.
Just as the world became very strange when Alice shrunk after drinking a potion in the children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, physicists have found things are quite different when they study the goings on at scales that are even smaller than the size of an atom.
By doubling the energy of the LHC, it will enable them to discover new characters in the wonderful and mysterious tale of how the Universe works and came to be.
Read the full article here.
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