Biggest Scientific Experiment Ever To Start Next Week

[suchandra 1]

Next week the simulation of the big bang, how, according modern science, our Universe was created, will start in Geneva, Switzerland.

It is the largest and most expensive scientific experiment ever made and more than 10000 scientists involved in that project are hoping to finally isolate the original chemical components how life /consciousness is made including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe. Critics say the LHC could create a black hole which expands until it swallows the Earth, but let's be optimistic and see what happens.

 

 

Landmark experiment to unlock secrets of Big Bang could cause end of the world, say scientists in court bid to halt it

 

By Fiona Macrae

Last updated at 4:44 PM on 01st September 2008

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It has cost £4.4billion and is designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.

But rather than providing vital information about the beginning of life, the world's biggest experiment could cause the end of the world, say scientists.

They fear that the Large Hadron Collider - due to be switched on in nine days' time - will create a black hole that could swallow the planet.

 

The Large Hadron Collider smashes particles together at nearly the speed of light

 

By smashing sub-atomic particles together at close to the speed of light, the LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe or Big Bang, shedding light on the building blocks of life.

 

But critics claim that the 'time machine', which has been built 300ft beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, could instead spawn a shower of mini-black holes.

Within four years, one of these 'celestial vacuums' could have swollen to such a size that it is capable of sucking the Earth inside-out, said Otto Rossler, one of a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge to the project.

They claim the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. However, the case at the European Court of Human Rights is not expected to delay the switch on, scheduled for Wednesday of next week.

Professor Rossler, a German chemist, said the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has admitted its project will create black holes but doesn't consider them to be a risk.

Artist's impression of the Big Bang, the titanic explosion which cosmologists believe created the Universe about 15 billion years ago.

He warned: 'My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside. I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.'

 

Those involved in the project have dismissed the claims as 'absurd' and insist that extensive safety assessments have found the experiment, which is funded by 20 countries, including the UK, to be safe.

A report written earlier this year stated: 'Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists.'

The lifespan of any mini-black holes would be 'very short', it added.

Critics say the LHC could create a black hole which expands until it swallows the Earth

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the arguments before the European Court of Human Rights had been answered in 'extensive safety assessments'.

He told the Sunday Telegraph: 'The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays. If they were dangerous we would know about it already.'

Scientists have used large particle colliders to smash atoms and pieces of atoms together for 30 years, but this machine has attracted so much attention because it is the most powerful ever built.

In the LHC beams of protons will be propelled through an 18-mile-long circular tunnel. More than 5,000 magnets lining the tunnel will accelerate the hundreds of billions of tiny particles to almost the speed of light, allowing them to complete one circuit in one-11,000th of a second.

There will be two beams going in opposite directions, each packing as much energy as a car travelling at 100mph.

When they reach almost the speed of light, they will be smashed head on into each other, breaking them into their constituent parts, including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe.

[suchandra 1]

Above it says, be optimistic, don't pass criticism on the scientists.

 

 

Scientists receive death threats over 'end-of-world' experiment

By Roger Highfield and Harry Wallop

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 08/09/2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/08/scicern108.xml

 

The scientists behind the world's biggest ever scientific experiment have received death threats from critics who claim it could cause the end of the world.

 

Experts are attempting to recreate the forces that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, which created the universe.

 

The £4.4 billion machine at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation based near Geneva, will be switched on this Wednesday .

 

Some of the scientists working on the experiment, who include a Welsh miner's son and a former pop star, have received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public who fear the machine could cause earthquakes and tsunamis that will destroy the world.

Large Hadron Collider: What will it find?

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will fire particles around its 17-mile tunnel. It will then smash protons — one of the building blocks of matter — into each other at energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before.

 

Scientists hope to recapture conditions not seen since near the birth of the universe almost 14 billion years ago. They could find answers to some of the biggest questions in physics, such as why the universe looks the way it does, and how to explain mass, gravity and mysterious "dark matter".

 

They could also find the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions, and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second.

 

Some sceptics remain unconvinced about its safety. Prof Otto Rossler, a German chemist who is one of a group of scientists attempting a last-minute court challenge to the project, is especially worried about the creation of black holes.

 

He believes it is possible that the black holes will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".

 

Other scientists say this is complete nonsense. They point to the fact that cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere should also be creating mini-black holes. Yet to date none of them has swallowed up the planet.

 

One of the leading figures behind the experiment is Dr Lynn Evans, the son of a miner, who said his fascination with science started as a boy, when he would create small explosions with his chemistry set at his council house in Aberdare.

 

Another is Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, who played keyboards with D:Ream, whose hit Things Can Only Get Better was adopted by the Labour Party as its 1997 election anthem.

 

He said members of the team had received death threats, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---."

 

Prof Cox said: "There's a kind of magic energy we've not been able to get to, and we know from previous experiments that's where things happen. Now for the first time, we'll be crossing that barrier."

 

• LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider. Large due to its size (approximately 27 km in circumference), Hadron because it accelerates protons or ions, which are hadrons, and Collider because these particles form two beams travelling in opposite directions, which collide at four points where the two rings of the machine intersect.

 

• The precise circumference of the LHC accelerator is 26 659 m, with a total of 9300 magnets inside. It is as big as the London Underground's Circle Line.

 

• All the magnets will be pre?cooled to -193.2°C (80 deg K) using 10,080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tonnes of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 deg K), making it the world's largest fridge

 

• The Large Hadron Collider represents the largest sum of money to date invested by a UK Government in a single scientific project, more than £500m.

 

• At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99% the speed of light.

 

• When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space.

[Sarva gattah 0]

The end of the world?

 

Inspired by Suchandra prabhu

 

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:11 pm

 

Today (Wednesday, well it is for me anyway), we see the first beam test of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, in the CERN’s labs in Switzerland. The point of this, quite frankly, bloody huge experiment is to try and recreate the Big Bang on a small scale, to then see how the Universe was created.

Sounds a little dangerous and there has been much controversy over how safe this is, but we’ll get to that later.

 

By creating a really tiny Big Bang, they’ll hopefully see how the Universe started and trace back to the very start, even before the biggest implosion/explosion the Universe has and probably will ever see.

 

Some background: we already have a “Standard Model” of physics, the basic core elements of everything we see and touch, including nuclei, atoms, photons, quarks, electrons and suchlike. However the problem these physicists face is knowing where these originally came from. They have this theory that they all came from one bigger particle, called the “Higgs boson”, named after Prof. Peter Higgs who first thought it up.

So after nearly a decade of work, construction, digging and thinking, they’ve created the biggest and most advanced particle accelerator the world has ever seen. Today, they’re turning it up to “11″.

 

If my 5 year old god daughter said to me, “Uncle Zack, can I have a Lego playset with horses?”, I’d say, “yeah why not sweetpea.” On the other hand, had she said, “Uncle Zack, can I have a Lego playset with horses that might end the world?”, I’d probably say, “how about a new bike instead?”

 

To be honest, it’s almost an impossibility that anything other than a few protons can get destroyed by the LHC. Prof. Brian Cox, who recently presented a BBC documentary about the LHC, as well as being the “inspiration” for this article, spoke to the BBC about these conspiracy theories about the end of the world:

 

 

“I am in fact immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around and try to scare people. This non-story is symptomatic of a larger mistrust in science, particularly in the US, which includes intelligent design amongst other things.

 

 

The only serious issue is why so many people who don’t have the time or inclination to discover for themselves why this stuff is total crap have to be exposed to the opinions of these half-wits.”

 

 

I mean, that’s pretty much the jist of the whole thing. They’re recreating the Big Bang on a very small scale, to find a God particle called the Higgs boson which may or may not exist, but will essentially be the golden finding of all physics ever found, and may help us understand what mass is all about - maybe even find something climate-change-ish in the process.

Just by the off chance we are all about to die, better time than any to quickly get some things off my chest:

 

• Mum, between the ages of about 12 to 17, I’d been stealing incremental amounts of money from your purse.
  
• Dad, I know your bank account details, and have been stealing incremental amounts of money from your account.
  
• I hate computers with an absolute passion. Sure I use them all the time, I’d be lost without them and I’m bloody good with them - but they really do drive me mad to the point I threw my laptop out the window.
  
• I’ve never used a Mac computer for more than 25 minutes in my entire life.
  
• Linux still confuses me.
  
• Facebook scares me because it seems to know everything about everybody.
  
• My mother actually wants me to marry another ZDNet blogger, after calling her one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen.
  
• Even though I hate everything about the iPod; the culture, the arrogance of having one, the technology and the fact you have to use iTunes with it, I still desperately want one.
  
• The Live Search team at Microsoft UK use Google as their search engine. Fact.
  
• I currently only have 42 songs on my Windows Media Player playlist which I just keep on repeat, regardless of having over 5GB of music on my server.
  
• I am (or would have been?) changing courses from Computer Science to Criminology & Social Policy because I just don’t feel geeky enough.
  
• I always have, and probably always will love Windows Vista. It never breaks, just sometimes goes a little slow on my desktop computer.
  
• I haven’t ever legally bought any software, game, or music online. [hint hint]
  
• A couple of years ago, I personally pissed off Bill Gates.

Again I reiterate the likelihood of us all being crushed into something smaller than a period point is less likely than zombies roaming the Earth and only feasting on the brains of idiotic politicians called George.

 

Amongst many things, Zack Whittaker is a good-for-nothing, pink-sock wearing, British student at the University of Kent in Canterbury UK studying computer science. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, or send him an email if you have a story you want to share.

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[suchandra 1]

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Cooldown_status.htm

 

Cooldown status

 

 

 

Sector 5-6

Sector 6-7

 

 

 

Sector 7-8

Sector 8-1

 

 

Sector 1-2 Sector 2-3

 

 

Sector 3-4 Sector 4-5

 

 

 

 

LHC Hardware Commissioning home page

[primate 0]

This is quite amusing.

 

Regards

[Sarva gattah 0]

 

This is quite amusing.

 

Regards

 

I got sucked in by this also but frankly who cares about Suchandra's mates the crazy scientists

[suchandra 1]

 

I got sucked in by this also but frankly who cares about Suchandra's mates the crazy scientists

You might not care, however, there're still lots of parents who do care when their children come home with school books which instruct, "God is dead - surrender to us, we'll teach you real knowledge how you and your offspring are nothing but primates."

Since Prabhupada mentions 920 times in the vedabase how scientists are tending to destroy religion and how Vaishnavas shouldn't keep quiet, we rather read instead, better don't care.

[primate 0]

I believe that mass, gravity and black holes are all observational artifacts of a complex underlying order of the universe yet to be revealed. The LHC experiments may provide clues as to the nature and dimensionality of this underlying order, but Higgs-bosons will not be found because they don’t exist. And although scientists at CERN obviously cannot know exactly what they are doing, I don’t think a stable black hole can be created as a result of these experiments.

 

What will happen when nothing is found? It may be concluded that quantum particles or strings are not the origin of mass and gravity and that these phenomena must be something else altogether. The scientists can then stop this type of experiments and start doing something more useful. It may also be decided, however, to build an even more powerful particle collider.

 

Regards

[suchandra 1]

 

What will happen when nothing is found? It may be concluded that quantum particles or strings are not the origin of mass and gravity and that these phenomena must be something else altogether. The scientists can then stop this type of experiments and start doing something more useful. It may also be decided, however, to build an even more powerful particle collider.

 

Regards

They say when nothing is found Physics has to be newly written because all would be wrong. Here they're for the first time coming closer, the materialistic physics is all speculative and based upon unproven assumptions.

If they cannot produce life with chemicals they should stop telling their theories as scientific.

Unfortunately vedic scientists didnt do anything past 20 years, it would have been easy for them to prove that life cannot be generated by chemicals. Looks like the Bhaktivedanta Institute was infiltrated by undercover saboteurs.

But whatever a lot of people are writing critical comments.

 

Regarding the search for the God particle

Regarding the search for the God particle

September 11, 2008 07:26 AM PDT

“Ravana (in the Ramayana): He wanted to make a staircase up to the heavenly planet. It is like that. Ugra-karma. Why they are doing so? Ajna, ajna. Foolish people.”

 

By Srila Prabhupada

"Being beyond the range of limited sense perception, the eternally irreproachable factor covered by the curtain of deluding energy, You are invisible to the foolish observer, exactly as an actor dressed as a player is not recognized." (SB 1.18.19)

maya-javanikacchannamm

ajnadhoksajam avyayam

na laksyase mudha-drsa

nato natyadharo yatha

So one side is maya-javanikacchannam. Maya, this illusory energy, is covering with the curtain. Just like we are seeing the Deity, but if there is a curtain, we cannot see. Similarly, there is a curtain which is illusory energy, maya. Big, big scientists, they cannot see what is behind this material nature. They cannot understand. Because the maya, this wonderful material energy, is acting in such a big curtain, they cannot understand that beyond this there is something else. They cannot understand. Maya-javanika acchannam. Illusory energy. They are thinking this material energy working, that is everything. Nothing beyond this. The whole world is covered. This is one side. And the other side: ajna.

Maya-javanikacchannam ajna... These materialistic persons, they are ajna, means they have no sufficient knowledge. Unless one develops the light of knowledge, sattva-guna... Sattva-guna is the light of knowledge. Rajo-guna and tamo-guna is darkness. Ignorance and passion. In this stage one cannot understand what is Krsna, what is God. Ajna. Rajas-tamo-bhavah. As we have discussed in Bhagavad, Srimad-Bhagavatam, rajas-tamo-bhavah, those who are infected with the two kinds of material modes, means rajo-guna and tamo-guna, they are simply busy, kama and lobha. They are busy only... Those who are passionate, they are simply busy for sense gratification, and those who are in ignorance, in darkness, they have no eyes to see.

Ugra-karma: very, very strong work

So these two classes of men... Mostly people are infected with these two kinds of modes of material nature. Rajas-tamas. The whole world. At the present moment, especially, mostly ignorance, and some of them are passionate. That passionate tendency is engaging them for so many industries and very, very strong work, ugra-karma. Ugra-karma. Ugra-karma means very strong...? What is, should be the English word? Ugra... Ugra, just like chili, pungent. There are many things. They are very strong in taste. So ugra-karma, these... Just like they are building hundred-and-fifty-story building. People can live comfortably in a small cottage or one-storied house or little more. But no, they're increasing. Their passionate activities are increasing. Just like in your country, in New York, now there is hundred-and-four-storied building, or more than that. Some building?

Brahmananda: Hundred and ten.

Prabhupada: Hundred and ten.

Brahmananda: Two of them.

Prabhupada: Two of them. They're increasing. They are thinking by increasing the stories more and more, that is advancement of civili... But how long you will increase? If you make million stories, still, it is unlimited. That we can see. So many airplanes are running in the sky. What is that? Still, it is vast. So many sputniks are running in the sky. Still, it is vast. So it is simply desire, that "If I make a hundred-and-fifty-storied house, then my life is successful." So in this way, instead of not wasting valuable time of this human life, they are simply wasting time in this way. That is also explained in the Ramayana. Just the Ravana. He wanted to make a staircase up to the heavenly planet. It is like that. Ugra-karma. Why they are doing so? Ajna, ajna. Foolish people.

Krishna is adhoksaja

Now, if we say that "You are all foolish, rascal people. You are wasting your time in this way," they will think us crazy. And they think us like that, that we do not recommend these things. So it is very, very difficult to understand Krsna in this condition, in this situation. Maya-javanikacchannam and ajna, foolish people. Ajna. And the other, other side, Krsna is adhoksaja. Even one is advanced in knowledge... Knowledge means, our knowledge means we manufacture words or syllables from A to Z. That's all. ABCD. We compose words with these twenty-six, or how many? A to Z?

Devotee: Yes.

Prabhupada: Yes. That is... And in Sanskrit, as in English it is A to Z, similarly in Sanskrit, a, a, i, u, and the end is ksa. So a and ksa, that is called aksa. Aksa-ja. And ja means generated. So we also compose words, those who are Sanskrit scholars, they compose words from a to aksa, just like English they compose words from A to Z.

So our mental speculation and advancement of education is limited between this a and ksa, aksa. Aksa-ja. But Krsna is adhoksaja. Adhoksaja means where these kinds of speculation, beginning from a to ksa, will not act. Therefore His name is Adhoksaja.

[suchandra 1]

Another problem is the conditioned soul's propensity to cheat - below scientists claim of having produced life. For the layman probably impossible to find out if this is actually true or fake.

 

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

 

By Alexis Madrigal September 08, 2008 | 10:30:34 AMCategories: Biology

 

 

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

"We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful."

By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.

"Once we can get a replicating environment, we're hoping to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions," said Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak's lab and now a chemist at Denver University.

Protocellular work is even more radical than the other field trying to create artifical life: synthetic biology. Even J. Craig Venter's work to build an artificial bacterium with the smallest number of genes necessary to live takes current life forms as a template. Protocell researchers are trying to design a completely novel form of life that humans have never seen and that may never have existed.

 

Over the summer, Szostak's team published major papers in the journals Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that go a long way towards showing that this isn't just an idea and that his lab will be the first to create artificial life -- and that it will happen soon.

"His hope is that he'll have a complete self-replicating system in his lab in the near future," said Jeffrey Bada, a University of California San Diego chemist who helped organize the Origin of Life conference.

Modern life is far more complex than the simple systems that Szostak and others are working on, so the protocells don't look anything like the cells that we have in our bodies or Venter's genetically-modified E. coli.

"What we're looking at is the origin of life in one aspect, and the other aspect is life as a small nanomachine on a single cell level," said Hans Ziock, a protocellular researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Life's function, as a simple nanomachine, is just to use energy to marshal chemicals into making more copies of itself.

"You need to organize yourself in a specific way to be useful," Ziock said. "You take energy from one place and move it to a place where it usually doesn't want to go, so you can actually organize things."

Modern cells accomplish this feat with an immense amount of molecular machinery. In fact, some of the chemical syntheses that simple plants and algae can accomplish far outstrip human technologies. Even the most primitive forms of life possess protein machines that allow them to import nutrients across their complex cell membranes and build the moleculesthat then carry out the cell's bidding.

Those specialized components would have taken many, many generations to evolve, said Ziock, so the first life would have been much simpler.

What form that simplicity would have taken has been a subject of intense debate among origin of life scientists stretching back to the pioneering work of David Deamer, a professor emeritus at UC-Santa Cruz.

What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.

Szostak's earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.

These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.

<embed src="

" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" align="right" height="350"> That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers believe, created life as we know it.

In a paper released this month in the <cite>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</cite>, Mansy and Szostak showed that the special membranes, fat bubbles essentially, were stable under a variety of temperatures and could have manipulated molecules like DNA through simple thermal cycling, just like scientists do in PCR machines.

 

The entire line of research, though, begs the question: where would DNA, or any other material carrying instructions for replication, have come from?

Many researchers have tried to tackle this problem of how RNA- or DNA-like molecules could have developed from the amino acids present on the early Earth. John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester, published a paper last year demonstrating one plausible way that RNA could have spontaneously been created in the prebiotic world.

Once such molecules existed, Szostak's lab's demonstrated in a Nature paper earlier this summer that nucleic acids could replicate inside a protocell (pdf).

But while many scientists agree the protocell work is impressive, not every scientist is convinced that it contributes to a reasonable explanation for the origin of life.

"Their work is wonderful inasmuch as what they are doing can be," said Mike Russell, a geochemist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It's just that I'm uneasy about the significance of it to the origin of life."

Russell argues that the very first life-like molecules on Earth would have been based on inorganic compounds. Instead of a fatty acid membrane, Russell argues that iron sulfide could have provided the necessary container for early cells.

But UCSD's Bada pointed out that it as unlikely we will ever know how life actually began.

"[szostak's] point, and how we all view it, is that it's a nice model, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it happened that way," he said.

Szostak suggested that even if life could theoretically or did begin some other way, his lab's hypothesis was (at least) experimentally plausible.

"We're now pretty much convinced that growth and division could occur under perfectly reasonable prebiotic conditions in a way that is not some artificial laboratory construction," he said.

And actually, the most intriguing possibility of all may be that the protocells in Szostak's lab do not closely model earthly life's origins. If that's true, human beings, ourselves the product of evolution from the most primitive organisms, would have created an alternative path to imbuing matter with the properties of life.

"What we have in biology is just one of many, many possibilities," Szostack said. "One of the things that always comes up when people talk about life and universal qualities is water. But is water really necessary? What if we could design a system that works in something else?"

[primate 0]

We may only create 'new' life-forms by modifying existing life-forms. There is absolutely no way to create (new) life directly from dead-matter.

 

Regards

[suchandra 1]

 

We may only create 'new' life-forms by modifying existing life-forms. There is absolutely no way to create (new) life directly from dead-matter.

 

Regards

 

Hackers claim there’s a black hole in the atom smashers’ computer network

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4744329.ece

Mike Harvey and Mark Henderson

 

Hackers have broken into one of the computer networks of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

 

A group calling itself the Greek Security Team left a rogue webpage describing the technicians responsible for computer security at the giant atom smasher as “schoolkids” — but reassuring scientists that they did not want to disrupt the experiment.

 

The hackers gained access to a website open to other scientists on Wednesday as the LHC passed its first test, sending its protons off on their dizzying journey through time and space, close to the speed of light.

 

The work of the scientists was not derailed and insiders scoffed at claims that the hackers were “one step away” from the systems controlling the experiment itself. The engineering team completed four days of scheduled work in the first 24 hours but what physicists are really waiting for is the big bang machine’s first collisions.

Apart from being wide of the mark from a scientific point of view, fears that the LHC might bring the world to an end this week were in any case premature because it was never going to smash any particles so early on.

 

This week’s successful start-up means that that should now happen sooner than expected, perhaps as early as the first week in October.

 

Doomsayers take note: there is still a slim chance that a microscopic (and harmless) black hole will be created, but only once the accelerator starts colliding protons together at close to its maximum energy.

 

The hackers appear to have targeted the computer system of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, one of the four detectors that will be analysing the progress of the experiment.

 

James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, the European Laboratory for Network Collision, home of the LHC, said: “We don’t know who they were but there seems to be no harm done. It appears to be people who want to make a point that CERN was hackable,” he added.

 

CERN officials are now confident that the collider will have started experiments to generate new physics well before world leaders visit on October 21 to inaugurate the project.

 

Many countries will send their heads of state or government to the event: President Sarkozy of France, President Couchepin of Switzerland and President Köhler of Germany have the date in their diaries, and either President Medvedev of Russia or Vladimir Putin may attend.

 

The British Prime Minister, however, has apparently decided to skip the opportunity to be publicly associated with black holes. Responding to a query about whether Gordon Brown would be there to celebrate the passing of the Apocalypse, Downing Street told The Times “to call back nearer the time”. Describing the CERN team’s progress, Mr Gillies said: “There is a 31-day schedule before the first high-energy collisions, and on Wednesday they did Days 1 to 4.”

 

On Wednesday night, one beam was circulated around the LHC’s ring about 300 times, and on Thursday, the anti-clockwise beam was fired around the accelerator for half an hour so it could be “captured” and made to travel in neat, compact pulses.

 

Protons make about 11,000 laps per second, which means 20 million circuits have been achieved. The next crucial step is likely next week, when the captured beams will be fired in opposite directions, and crashed into each other inside the four huge detectors.

 

A couple of weeks later is the real moment of truth. The LHC’s superconducting magnets will be fired up to 70 per cent of maximum power, producing proton beams with an energy of 5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) — 5,000 billion electrovolts — and crashing them together. “That’s where the new physics starts,” Dr Gillies said. It is possible that scientists will start accumulating the evidence that could prove supersymmetry, the hypothesis that all particles have a twin.

 

The plan next year is to ramp it up to its maximum energy of 7TeV. The accelerator will then be providing results that should shed light on some of the central questions in physics.

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