| Ср, Фев 28, 2007 09:49am Женатый человек - 6287 d back | ↑↓ |
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Secrets of universe eyed as collider core installed
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world's leading center for research into the origins of matter on Wednesday took a giant step toward completion of a 15-year project which scientists hope will unlock many secrets of the universe.
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A huge magnet core, weighing 1,920 metric tons or the equivalent of five jumbo jets, was lowered into a vast cavern 100 meters below ground at the multinational center, CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
"We think this project is going to uncover things we cannot dream of at the moment," said Professor Jos Engelen, Chief Scientific Officer of CERN, the 26-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Some of his colleagues say the experiment, smashing particles together at high speed in a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), may bring new knowledge such as the possible existence of multiple dimensions beyond the four of traditional physics -- width, length, height and time.
Others speak, if cautiously, of venturing into realms long regarded as those of speculative science fiction -- multiple universes, parallel worlds, black holes in space linking different levels of existence.
"This is a very exciting time for physics. The LHC is poised to take us to a new level of understanding of our universe," says Tejinder Virdee, spokesman for the key particle detector part of the project, known by its initials as CMS.
The magnet and its surrounding equipment that was moved down into place with the help of a custom-built gantry crane and a hydraulic jacking system is the heaviest piece of the CMS, and the eighth of 15 parts of the Collider.
Apart from magnets and detectors, the focal element of the LHC is a 27-km channel circling through a wide underground tunnel along which particles will be forced in opposite directions at the speed of light to smash together.
The experiments are due to start up by the end of 2007 and be fully in operation in mid-2008.
Using particle accelerators built for an earlier version of the LHC, controllers will be able to ensure around 600 million collisions a second.
Each collision, according to CERN, will recreate conditions that existed just nanoseconds after the Big Bang -- a fireball of energetic radiation -- which scientists say happened some 15 billion years ago and brought the universe into existence.
By studying what happens to the particles, a process that will be tracked on ultra-sophisticated computers, CERN researchers believe they will gain knowledge of how the matter of the known universe -- and perhaps unknown ones -- was formed.
They hope they will also learn more about the dark -- or invisible -- matter that is believed to exist in quantities 30 to 100 times more than that of the bright matter of which the observable universe and everything in it, like humans, is made.
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