This week: Science heating up
On Wednesday at about 8.30am Greenwich time, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom smasher on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, turned on the largest and most expensive scientific experiment in the history of humankind. It is also the most complex machine devised by man.
Also called a particle accelerator, the LHC will be sending streams of hadrons (commonly known as protons) at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light and have them collide head-on. The LHC is the largest international collaborative effort after the United Nations and cost the nations and scientific institutions involved more than HK$62 billion to build. It is also the world's largest fridge. To achieve the superconductivity necessary for the experiment, the 27km-long accelerator is pre-cooled with 10,080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen to minus-193.2 degrees Celsius and then it is further cooled to an astonishing minus-271.3 with 59 tonnes of liquid helium.
To prevent the stream of hadrons from erroneously colliding with errant air molecules, the scientists created the emptiest space in our solar system. They created a super-vacuum with a resultant pressure in the accelerator that is one-tenth that on the moon. When the particles collide, the temperature generated will be an unimaginable 100,000 times that of the Sun, albeit on a much smaller scale. There are four main sensors in the system that will generate 15 million gigabytes of data for more than 80,000 computers worldwide to analyse. The immensity of this experiment is staggering and makes me wish I was part of it.
Some of my close friends find the number of interests that I have surprising. An initial conversation with a new acquaintance would usually start on the topic of my vocation as a veterinarian. It's a great ice-breaker, I admit, but once they get to know me, I am full of odd surprises. I have always had a long-time interest in other fields of study, such as philosophy, history, mythology, archaeology, anthropology, marine biology, aviation, mathematics and especially physics.
But my all-time favourite has to be physics. It is not just the fundamental way that physics describes the world and the universe that is so integral to everyday life; physics is also an integral part of the history of modern civilisation. The discoveries in physics have made possible the world that we live in now. Without it we would be less than primitive.
