“‘The LHC is on its way again. First beam of 2010 circulated in each direction by 04.10 CET (0310 GMT),’ said CERN in a tweet on its website on Sunday.
The 3.9 billion euro (5.6 billion dollars) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down in December to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels. It was run for a few weeks after being successfully revived from a 14 month breakdown.
The particle collider — inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva — is aimed at understanding the origins of the universe by recreating the conditions that followed the Big Bang.
In the weeks before the technical shutdown in December, the collider achieved over a million particle collisions and accelerated proton beams to energy levels never reached before, according to CERN.
Collisions reached a world record energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV), already allowing scientists to gather data.
But CERN now wants to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate conditions close to the Big Bang, and run it at those levels for 18 to 24 months.”
Read more at Physorg.com
I haven’t been following this story for a while now and was just wondering, is there still a chance of it creating a black hole or was that all dismissed when they first powered it up?
BANG!!! Oops.
Yay!
this makes me so feckin mad! who cares what happened after the big bang? i personally couldnt care less let alone recreating it. why?? waste of money, and i dont particularly want to implode into a black hole! lol
x
Waste of money??? Certainly not. I guarantee you that no one would would invest in a five billion dollar science experiment if they didnt think there would be some payoff.
And who cares what happened after the big bang??? I wonder what the world would be like if everyone had that same attitude. Does the Sun revolve around the Earth? Who cares! It doesnt affect me. Theory of general relativity? Psssh. HUGE waste of time.
And come on people. This fear of the Large Hadron Collider producing black holes, is all media hype. This is what the media does. They like to freak you out.
The LHC is very exciting and promising!! And I for one, and very happy about it.
@Dmaco Wheres your sense of adventure? Who cares what happened after the big bang? You and me where born out of it – and understanding the grander scheme of the universe will eventually make humanity traverse the the known galaxies and create our own universes in multi dimensional realities.
And on top of that…its quite useful. All that technology and data will have spin offs we can only dream of. E.g. You know where the world wide web was developed? Thats right –
C E R N
Courtney: There is a VERY (as in infinitisemally) slight chance that a singularity (black hole without an event horizon) will be created, but it would most likely evaporate very quickly.
Dmaco: Yeah, we could just keep ourselves busy with eating, breeding and having some fun (bread and games, anyone?), but some people are curious to know how the universe works. Can knowledge not be a goal in and of itself? That’s how the best inventions came along — accidentally, while people were investigating things to satisfy their curiosity.
To prove those odd (non-evolution) people wrong it is worth every penny.
haha didnt realise there were such highly strung people posting on this blog these days! i dont see the point in risking ending life itself just to see how it started. But then again, mans destiny is to destroy itself so i guess we’re just following our destiny. Black holes dont sound much fun to me, amazing yes, as long as they arent in the planet!
I wonder what will be scheduled for testing on December 2012
))) They will surely take a few months off before and after that time, right? lol
@spiderabc – I agree with you on that: worth all of king midas’s gold!
yay! *does quantum dance*
Let the science continue!
Its about as much chance as making a black hole as it making a pancake made of gold.