Stanford Autonomous Systems Lab/Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab It’s the third run for the massive machine, with greater precision and discovery potential than ever before thanks to the upgraded data readout and selection systems, as well as new detector systems and computing infrastructure. On Tuesday, scientists at CERN will begin collecting data for their experiments, and the Large Hadron Collider will run around the clock for almost four years. Proton beams have already been circulating in the accelerator complex since April, when it was switched on after being closed for three years of maintenance and upgrades. It works by smashing tiny particles together to allow scientists to observe them and see what’s inside. Now, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border are restarting the collider with the aim of understanding more about the Higgs boson, other subatomic particles and the mysteries of dark matter – an invisible and elusive substance that can’t be seen because it doesn’t absorb, reflect or emit any light.Ĭonsisting of a ring 27 kilometers (16.7 miles) in circumference, the Large Hadron Collider – located deep underneath the Alps – is made of superconducting magnets chilled to ‑271.3☌ (-456 F), which is colder than outer space. I like our odds.A decade ago, the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, proved the existence of an subatomic particle called the Higgs boson – thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe dating back to the big bang billions of years ago.
And if that sounds laughably optimistic, remember: we just spotted our first asteroid in 1801, and we’ll be ready to deflect one in seven years. 'If the Higgs mass were really 127 GeV and the top mass were a little lower than its most likely value, then actually the universe would be completely stable and the vacuum would be in the true minimum.’"īut supposing it does turn out that the Higgs field apocalypse is a real danger, and supposing it seems imminent on a future human scale, our descendants may be able to predict-and, ultimately, prevent-it using a surgical application of exactly the sort of Higgs-warping technology Hawking describes above. Then, new calculations could indicate that the universe has more stability … 'The top quark strongly affects the vacuum by its quantum fluctuations because it is so heavy,’ Allanach says. "Most scientists … expect that the will find other particles in due course. This natural apocalypse scenario, and Hawking’s accidental apocalypse scenario, may both fall apartas CERN’s experiments continue: “Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10¹⁰⁰ years … So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse." CERN’s Gian Giudice, one of the world’s leading particle physicists, explains that the Higgs field appears to be resting on a precipice-and that quantum tunneling, and the conversion of the Higgs field to an unmanageable state, could unfold in the distant future: The idea that humanity might one day be able to destroy the universe by disrupting the Higgs field with some unimaginably powerful kind of supercollider is based on some very speculative science, but the idea of a natural Higgs-based apocalypse is more widely accepted. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming, … particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.” This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV). In the preface to an upcoming book, Stephen Hawking remarked that humanity might-at some point in the distant future-be capable of accidentally destroying the universe itself by disrupting the Higgs field:
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