Now, the LHC has finally come back to life. According to CERN, upon its revival it would achieve "higher beam intensities." The return of the Large Hadron Collider CERN’s press release at the time said the outage would last for two years. #European supercollider Offline#The LHC was taken offline for upgrades in 2018. To quote Sabine Hossenfelder, former physicist and researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies: "Let’s be honest: It’s disappointing." The Webb telescope just took the deepest photo of the universe ever.Astronomers took stunning new pic of a black hole.Yes, there are 100 million rogue black holes wandering our galaxy.None of that has happened, and the LHC failed to generate headlines for years - except in 2016 when a weasel climbed into the wiring and died, shutting the whole system down. Others hoped it would unlock the secrets of dark matter. One theoretical physicist, Erez Etzion, believed it might advance our understanding of other dimensions. "It's disappointing"īut when the LHC was first fired up in 2008, there were hopes beyond just discovering the Higgs boson, which mostly just answered an obscure question about matter that few laypeople had ever bothered to wonder about. Maybe they were mad about the whole black hole thing. The particle Heuer and his team observed in 2012 matched theoretical calculations by British physicist Peter Higgs, who had first proposed the existence of such a field, and the particles that constitute it, so Higgs won the Nobel Prize, along with his colleague Francois Englebert.įunnily enough, the CERN team was snubbed by the Nobel Foundation. In short, using the LHC to smash particles together - as scary as that may be to some - was the quickest way to observe something called the Higgs field, a theoretical energy field that permeates everything, and imbues matter with mass. In Geneva in 2012, CERN’s director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, announced to great fanfare that his team had discovered the Higgs boson particle. The LHC wasn’t designed to create a black hole at all, but to figure out - among other things - why matter has mass. Two researchers proposed in 2011 that mini black holes “gravitationally bind matter without significant absorption.” In other words, mini black holes drift around, not bothering anyone. Oliver also interviewed actual scientists at CERN, who were much more reassuring, but also much less funny.Īnd yes, for all anyone knows, the LHC might have created black holes no one has been able to observe, and yet Earth is still here. That essay kicked off years of commentary, both serious and not, about the LHC killing us all, including John Oliver’s 2009 segment on The Daily Show in which he interviewed a science teacher who believed that its experiments had a “one in two chance” of creating an Earth-destroying black hole. Back when the LHC was still being planned, some scientists believed that it would create a black hole, prompting the Italian physicist Francesco Calogero to write an essay in 2000 called “ Might a laboratory experiment destroy planet earth?” People have been hyperventilating about this very, very big particle accelerator, which is run by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), since Bill Clinton was president. On Tuesday, July 5, at a giant underground compound in Meyrin, Switzerland, physicists announced that they had discovered three "exotic" particles, never before seen by science - a feat accomplished via the world’s largest ring of superconducting magnets, also known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).įor anyone who had gotten their science news from TikTok, the discovery of three new subatomic particles probably didn’t live up to the promise of a " portal that's gonna open on July 5," or the widely shared notion that the event would look like a clip from the latest season of Stranger Things.
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