Sooooo...any of you nerds have an update on what's happening down near Geneva?? Have those 4 billion buckaroos helped the thousands of physicists unlock the origins of the universe yet or what?

not yet, so far, just an expensive toy...

Well so far CERN has discover neutrinos don't travel faster than C(light speed).They are still searching for the Higgs boson and they are still colliding subatomic particles and are finding new elementary particles.Their main goal is to find the boson which would be more evidence the BBT may have happened.

they have also discovered new, exotic particles that last for about a millionth of a second...

yep that too.A nanosecond of existence is still a existence.

If you were a gnat on an atom in the target a nanosecond would be an eternity.

if you were on the particle that spun off a 'nanosecond' would be your 'big bang'.

Time only means what you can measure in your sight range.

What if your sight range only covered the spun particle?

Would you not think that God was pissed?

Maybe He just said to Himself,OK,let's give those Buggers something to do!

He has an expensive sense of humour....

From memory, this experiment was ending sometime this year, I'll have to read up on it some more.

Did i say 4 billion??...try doubling that!!

I found an interview that a current affair programme called 60 minutes did last month.

just wow!...

Have you ever wondered how it all began?

Humankind has been pondering that question since the moment we first gazed up at the stars.

Now a million or so years later, a team of scientists in Europe is on the verge of unlocking the secret of the big bang, that explosive split-second when our universe was created.

The scale of this experiment in a bunker deep beneath the Swiss Alps is, frankly, mind-blowing.

It's the largest engineering project since man went to the moon and, if it works, we may finally get an answer to the most baffling mystery of all.
Full transcript:

LIAM BARTLETT: Have you wondered how it all began? Humankind has been pondering that question since the moment we first gazed up at the stars. Now, a million or so years later, a team of scientists in Europe is on the verge of unlocking the secret of the Big Bang – that explosive split second when our universe was created. The scale of this experiment in a bunker, deep beneath the Swiss Alps is, frankly, mind-blowing. The largest engineers’ project since man went to the moon. If it works we may finally get an answer to the most baffling mystery of all.

LIAM BARTLETT: It's fitting that mankind's greatest quest – to solve the mysteries of creation, is going on alongside a stunning example of nature's work – the Swiss Alps. My guide on this journey of discovery is Australia's leading astronomer, Professor Fred Watson.

FRED: This base here has been gouged out by a glacier over the last 100 million years or so. It makes you feel a bit small.

LIAM BARTLETT: Very. But science class was never like this. The highest rail line in Europe climbs the northern face of the Eiger and delivers us to an astonishing scientific outpost, far above the clouds and the lesser concerns of life.

FRED: I have spent so many years working in telescope domes like this that I’ve started to look like one.

LIAM BARTLETT: At the High Altitude Research Station you just can't help wondering about our place in the cosmos.

FRED: Telescope domes like this are what really set us on the trail of finding out the origin of the universe.

LIAM BARTLETT: The Big Bang?

FRED: The Big Bang, right back to the beginning.

LIAM BARTLETT: The beginning has always been the biggest question of all. How did we get here? Where did the universe come from? And back in the 1920s, science gave us an answer. It all started with the Big Bang. What is the Big Bang?

FRED: The Big Bang is an event that took place about 13.5 billion years ago. It's the event that we believe gave rise to the universe that we see today and everything in it, of course.

LIAM BARTLETT: And now in the most ambitious science experiment in history, a giant contraption built deep underground is recreating the moment of the Big Bang – when a single original atom expanded into billions of flying particles that came together to form life, the universe and well, everything.

FRED: From the Earth to the sun to the other planets and the stars and galaxies, all those things were formed from the Big Bang and are essentially in the Big Bang. But it’s the creation of space and time and matter that are the really interesting things. And of course, that all happened in the first gazillionth of a second and that’s where this machine comes in.

LIAM BARTLETT: To recreate the Big Bang requires a Big Bang machine. That’s the nickname they’ve given to the monster they’ve built here in Geneva. So big it straddles the Switzerland-French border. Let me show you – it starts just over here, around about where that brown dome is. Now, if you follow it around all the way underground, right out to the horizon as far as the eye can see and then along into the foothills of those mountains, it swings around in an elliptical shape and back round the dome. 27km long, a kind of scientific race track. The $8 billion large Hadron Collider is designed to replicate the exact conditions of creation, on a smaller scale. It's all about protons.

FRED: The Proton is a subatomic particle that is common throughout all of nature, so it's one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.

LIAM BARTLETT: The protons are sent whizzing around the Hadron Collider circuit in opposite directions – calculated to meet head-on in billions of explosive collisions. All monitored by a control room full of excited physicists.

ANNA: Each of these little conclusions we're making, the energy will be the same as a millionth of a millionth of a second after the start of the Big Bang. That's the conditions we're replicating inside the machine every 400 billion times a second or something like that.

LIAM BARTLETT: The figures and formulas may be mind boggling to you and me, but Australian scientist Dr Anna Phan, a physics graduate from Melbourne University, says there's nothing complicated about what they're seeking here.

ANNA: Some deeper understanding of where we come from, where the universe comes from and how we see it and our place within it. Because we tend to be a bit self-absorbed at times and worry about our own little lives and what we're going to eat next and watch next but here we're always asking the big questions.

FRED: The mechanics of the machine, the wonderful technology that’s there, is really just a vehicle to get us to the answers.

LIAM BARTLETT: The one answer that's eluded even our greatest scientistic minds is how the Big Bang's particles managed to form together into solid mass. And even more astonishing, create an environment on earth that led to human existence. That’s where God comes in. Or at least the ‘God Particle’. The theory put forward by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs is that one special particle dictated the formation of mass and is so is responsible for creation itself.

FRED: So the idea of the God Particle, the Higgs boson, is that there is something we can pin down as being a particle that gives everything else this property of mass. In other words, a single particle that would make things seem heavy or light, depending on how it was arranged.

LIAM BARTLETT: The greatest aim of this entire experiment is to find the God Particle amid the billions of colliding protons using this giant detector. And that’s what they're looking for first up?

FRED: That is one of the critical things that the Large Hadron Collider has been built for.

LIAM BARTLETT: Australia is one of 80 countries contributing to the project – with $2.5 million and some of our most brilliant young physicists hoping to find the elusive particle that started it all.

TONY: Well, that would be huge, just unbelievable. I mean, personally, I would like to see that within my lifetime, I really would.

LIAM BARTLETT: Is it all it's cracked up to be, this machine? I mean, is it going to deliver something spectacular?

ALICK: Yeah. Yeah.

ANNA: Can I have a show of hands who thinks this machine will definitely find the God particle, the Higgs Boson?

FRED: Really?

LIAM BARTLETT: $8 billion and I can't even get a majority. Building this amazing machine is itself, a stunning scientific achievement. So while this may look like a giant water pipe, an old fashioned water pipe, you're telling me it's really a magnet?

ALICK: This is a very large magnate. It’s used to bend the particles around in a ring over a 27km circumference and it has two beam pipes, one this way and one this way.

LIAM BARTLETT: The engineer making sure all those speeding particles collide where they're supposed to, is a very clever New Zealander, Dr Alick Macpherson.

ALICK: The particles when we’ve accelerated them go to 99.999998 % of the speed of light.

LIAM BARTLETT: Are you sure about that?

ALICK: The last digit is dodgy.

FRED: E equals MC squared, what a ride.

LIAM BARTLETT: If you have trouble getting your head around that velocity, here is another way to look at it. This luge seems pretty quick to me. But if I was one of those tiny particles, at this rate it would take me 40 minutes to do a complete circuit of the Hadron Collider. In a Formula One car, I could do it in five minutes but in reality they're being shot around at rates faster than that, at speeds almost impossible to comprehend.

ALICK: If you were watching the protons, they would be going around 11, 285 times a second.

LIAM BARTLETT: 11,000 times in a 27km circle?

ALICK: The speed of light is very fast.

LIAM BARTLETT: If it is starting to sound like science fiction, prepare for warped speed. The Hadron Collider is boldly going where no physicist has gone before.

FRED: There might be more dimensions than what we can see, but which are hidden from us on the normal scale.

LIAM BARTLETT: Another dimension?

FRED: Not just one, probably more like another six.

LIAM BARTLETT: You're almost talking about time travel?

FRED: Yeah and that is right. Subatomic particles take on all kinds of characteristics. They can, for example, be in two places at the same time and that is truly weird.

LIAM BARTLETT: If a particle can transfer from one dimension to another, perhaps Captain Kirk and his crew were on to something. Are you talking about things like a Star Trek application, "Beam me up, beam me down"?

FRED: Who knows whether we will be ever able to beam human beings as in, "Beam me up, Scottie", is a very interesting question, but it's not one you should rule out. I, the only thing I would say about that, is that I would not like to volunteer to be the first person to be tested on this idea.

LIAM BARTLETT: Results in this grand experiment won't come overnight. It will take years to process the data that's being gathered. But one thing is certain – what's happening here, under the Swiss Alps, in one way or another, will change the world as we know it.

FRED: It has the potential to uncover new rules which may take us forward in a quite different direction in physics from the way physics has been going so far, which is exactly what happened when Einstein came along.

LIAM BARTLETT: It's phenomenal thinking, isn't it?

FRED: It's far out, yeah. Science is often in a kind of symbiotic relationship with science fiction, because what is one day science fiction is often tomorrow's science.

We'll never know with certainty, the physical matter of what actually happened. We can only infer it.

I think that's why they're searching for the "god particle"...they think that may hold alot of answers to the "inferred questions"??

But will we be able to truly understand it?

Perhaps if it is explained to us in a "See spot run" kind of way...i imagine we will have some understanding. For 8 billion....one would hope so anyway!!

Also taking into consideration that the human brain is the most sophisticated computer on this planet, one would like to think that we could utilize some of the 75% that we currently don't use into understanding the possibilities...at least.

we'll better understand it. that's what physics is all about.

Although there are certainly aspects of the experiments that are complex, the basics are pretty simple. They take protons of a known mass and add a huge amount of mass to them. They then cause these protons and anti protons to collide head-on which converts all of the mass to energy. They then see what is recreated by the pool of energy. A large enough pool of energy should produce Higgs bosons which may soon exit outside our known four dimensional universe into another dimension showing the possible existence of the eleven dimensional universe.

They have had problems with short circuits in the ring magnets which have caused great damage. They, after making repairs, have been very cautious about running the ring at full power. They were going to try again in August but I haven't kept up so the schedule may have changed. Cern will give a seminar to update the world on it's results on July 4th.

Matter can be converted to energy and vice versa. They take a proton and an anti-proton and increase their mass dramatically to a known higher mass. When these particles annihilate each other, the known mass converts to a known pool of energy which creates particles of known mass. What is left over could be particles which cannot exist here and the energy is compared to the anticipated energy of the particle for confirmation.

Liam Bartlett's report is loveable tongue-in-cheek journalism, which also shows the humour of scientists.
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I am sure physicists have their reason, but why are they so solidly bent on finding Higg's Bosom? Or why are they so doggonedly sure that the H-bosom theory is ture? I mean, they put their money where their mouths are, they created this 8 billion-dollar big collider. This shows confidence, which I would not have, but then again, I am not a learned physicist.

Then again:

Rome built the Temple to Jupiter, which cost 2,356 gold pieces then;

The Jews built the second Temple, at a price tag of 7,435,675 foreskins according to the covenant (contract) with god;

The pharaohs built the pyramids, some of which cost 5,663,778 human lives each;

Hitler built the Third Reich, which cost Germans their faces (about 120,000,000 faces lost and still counting);

The Ford Motor Company built 334,564,783 trucks and utility vehicles and cars, which cost the earth 45,669 known species lost to extinction;

Bill Gates built a computer hardware empire, which cost 3,444,1987,887 human brains worldwide. (They just went zap, extremely quickly, in 4,879,777,342,778,857.888773023 nanoseconds. Give or take a few of the last digits in the expression here given.)

Metalwing, thanks for the info.

It seems a bit dodgey. (I am thankful for your info, it's not your message I will criticize here but the forethought put into the concept of the experiment.)

It's dodgy, because everything in the experiment hinges on counting up and acconting for energy. Energy put in, and energy that came out. If there is a difference, particularly a loss, then the energy in shape of some particles, left our dimension.

Fine.

But energy is not easy to count. Some of the energy will dissipate as heat in a 27-km long pipe, and therefore extremely careful watch over the temp changes of the led pipe must be held.

This is in fact impossible to do, if we allow that the loss of energy will be small.

If the loss of energy will be so small that the lost energy's equivalent would raise the temperature of one litre of water one Censius degree, then maybe, I don't know, maybe that would be caught by the measuring apparatus' sensors.

But what if the energy to escape is 1 degree of difference distributed over one teaspoon of water? I don't think that is measurable in a pipe that is 27 kilometers long.

Or if it is... let's say it is... then what if the energy difference is equal to that which would heat one nanolitre of water one degree Celsius?

WE DONT'KNOW HOW MUCH LOSS WE CAN EXPECT. So loss may happen, but it's not detected, and our experiment would be a success except we wouldn't know it were.

I am sure this has been tought out. So what we are watching for, will give us an indication of multiple dimensions only if the energy loss is large so much that our sensors can positively tell us it happened.

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I have talked to my uncle some two years ago, about this collider machine. I told him, what if it blows our entire world out of existence? He said, watch this: "There nothing going to happen because everything that can happen has happened already. They can't make something happen that hasn't been already done."

This is smart, but what if: the thing that has happened was the big bang?

I mean, if we are really and truly replicating the conditions of the big bang, as the article said, then we will cause a big bang to happen. (If it's not going to happen, then we are simply not replicating the conditions exactly enough.)

This leads us to the theory, that the Big Bangs, each one of them in an infinite series, happen when enough scientists know enough science to be made curious how the big bang happened, and each time there is enough knowledge like today, to build a machine to cause the big bang, under the auspices of "we just want to see what's going to happen, you know, if there are many dimensions like the theorists say."

The controls are all in place, check, the pumps are primed, check, the measuring devices have all been wound up, check, thow the switch, bang. I mean, BAAAAANNNNGGGGG!!! A very big, big, big bang.

Maybe matter will leave our dimension, maybe it won't. Maybe we will never learn, even thought energy difference is high well measurable. We will not know, becase there will be a huge new big bang, after which in 15.4 billion years later another group of scientists will bring the knowledge of the santients of that world to the point at which they will curiously ask, and defend their 8-billion dollar expenditure with saying their true quest, "we just want to see..."

Many people, ordinary folks, say they can learn big life lessons from animals, from pets, about their own inner nature.

My advice to the physicists bent on this experiment would be, "it's curiousity that killed the cat."

______________________

I think we need a charismatic leader who will start a movement of donating a cat each to all the nuclear physicists in this world, with the gift card saying, "Study this beast's behaviour."

A gift that will truly keep on giving.

Kahu... there IS progress. When I was in school, 50 years ago, the usage efficiency of the brains was pegged at only 2%. Our Grade Two public school teacher, Emma neni, told us so. Now we are up to 25% of capacity usage of hardware resources of our brain.

It means a nearly twelve hundred percent increase. In half a lifetime. In the span of two full generations.

Not bad.

The Standard Model lives. Higgs boson looks to be there
announcement forthcoming. Actually it is very exciting because
nobody knows what to make of it exactly. But it is another
clue.