By Brian Kirschner
In his latest book, Collider: The Search For The World’s Smallest Particles (Wiley), Paul Halpern, PhD, professor of physics, has turned his attention to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva that was completed in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), at a cost of nearly $8 billion.
“The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful
instrument in the world for particle physics,” Dr.
Halpern explained. “It’s the largest collider ever
made, a 17-mile ring around which protons will
zoom at 99.99999 percent of the speed of light
before being allowed to collide at four different
intersection points.”
After a coolant leak and magnet failure shut it down in September 2008, new safeguards were put in place, and it is projected to restart and begin collecting data in November 2009. The powerful device will be used by physicists to study the smallest known particles—the fundamental building blocks of all things. This project will replicate the incredibly energetic conditions just after the Big Bang and could produce massive exotic particles unseen since those times. Halpern walks the reader through the history of particle physics from the very first collider to the state of physics in the U.S. and the world today.
Could any of the tiny objects created disrupt nature’s delicate balance and wreak havoc? Halpern has the answer and more in this realworld treasure hunt that aims to find the elusive God Particle, dark matter, dark energy, and maybe even portals to higher dimensions.
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