And cool!!!!
The Large Hadron Collider is finally scheduled to begin its first test tomorrow.
Scientists say the collider is finally ready for an attempt to circulate a beam of protons the whole way around the 17-mile tunnel. The test, which takes place Wednesday, is a major step toward seeing if the the immense experiment will provide new information about the way the universe works.
"It's really a generation that we've been looking forward to this moment, and the moments that will come after it in particular," said Bob Cousins, deputy to the scientific leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of six experiments inside the collider complex. "September 10 is a demarcation between finishing the construction and starting to turn it on, but the excitement will only continue to grow."
The collider consists of a particle accelerator buried more than 300 feet near Geneva, Switzerland. About $10 billion have gone into the accelerator's construction, the particle detectors and the computers, said Katie Yurkewicz, spokewoman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is host to the collider.
In the coming months, the collider is expected to begin smashing particles into each other by sending two beams of protons around the tunnel in opposite directions. It will operate at higher energies and intensities in the next year, and the experiments could generate enough data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.
And this is what I really love about science - the scientists are all excited because they DON'T KNOW what they're going to find yet and they're all stoked to find out.
Since this is exploratory science, the collider may uncover surprises that contradict prevailing theories, but which are just as interesting, said Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
"When Columbus sails west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn't find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting," said Lykken, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of six experiments inside the collider complex.
Real scientists don't have a pre-formed opinion or agenda on how an experiment will turn out. They just do the experiment and learn from whatever happens. It's all about data and facts and results - unlike religious superstition which is about taking your pet theory & trying to cherry-pick data & manipulate results to force it into supporting whatever you were going to believe anyway.
I'm excited to see what this will uncover - I think it's going to tell us a lot about the beginnings of our universe.
