The Largest Telescope On Earth

This is it - September 10th. Switch on time for the "largest telescope" on the planet.

The LHC - Large hadron Collider - is a particle accelerator the like of which has never been seen before.

It is a circular tube 27km in circumference, so large that when you look down it, it appears straight.

Although particle physics is one level above me, I still understand most of what happens there.

The whole tube is a vacuum, and we will send protons around it at speeds never dreamed of before. In the other direction, we send antiprotons. Antiprotons have everything in them reversed,except mass. This means they are negatively charged, and because they are the same mass, the same magnets can be used to turn them.

The current in the magnetic coils are so large and energy draining they have to be cooled to 1.9 Deg K, that is -271.1 deg C to make the current superconducting. Superconductivity only happens at these cold temperatures and the upshot is that the electrical resistance of the wires disappears, so the power can be switched off.

At various points on the circuit, the two beams of particles cross and BANG.

Particle plus antiparticle means they both disappear into electromagnetic waves.

But these waves have so much energy, they don't last for long and SNAP, just like putting enough stretching energy into an elastic band will make it SNAP.

What comes out of the SNAP is a plethora of new particles and antiparticles, some of which we may not have seen yet.

What is worrying is that a gamut of people claim that creating a mini Big Bang (very mini compared to infinite energy) will produce strange things that will annihilate the Earth as well. Mini black holes are feared also (the same size of a proton), but they would not last long either.

September 10th will be a day long remembered, and I WILL BE THERE!!!!

Geneva expects.

Incidentally, the telescope analogy is valid because normal telecopes optically see small things (distant stars) and this "telescope" also "sees" small things with the huge ATLAS detector.

To those people worried about mini black holes the size of proton, this is just silly. Why? To create a black hole that small would still require the mass of a good-sized mountain, but the total mass of the particles in the tube is less than 1 gram.