Manhattan Project Revisited: Large Hadron Collider To Power Up...

Back during the days of the atomic bomb development, some scientists feared that an atomic bomb could destroy the entire atmosphere. However, Robert Oppenheimer's team soon proved that this was a calculation error (they didn't have computers as we understand them today). Scientists Konopinski, C. Marvin, and Teller wrote report LA-602, showing that ignition of the atmosphere was impossible, not just unlikely.

Similarly, now some fear that the Large Hadron Collider, which is a state of the art European particle accelerator that will send beams of protons around a 17-mile underground ring, will create a black hole, putting the Earth and all of its creatures at risk. CERN issued a report revealing that, even if a black hole were to form, it would rapidly evaporate due to Hawking Radiation.

Also, a new report published in IOP Publishing's Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, reveals that in fact, this “end of the world rumor” is all bogus. The report explained that since cosmic ray collisions are more energetic than those produced in the LHC, but are incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, the LHC experiment is not something we should fear.

The first high-energy collision is set to start after the Large Hadron Collider is officially unveiled.

In February, the last piece of the ATLAS detector, the world’s largest general-purpose particle detector, has been lowered down a 300 feet shaft at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) underground facility along the Swiss-French border. This concluded the construction of the high-tech device which started in 2003.

The ATLAS detector, measuring 46 meters long, 25 meters high and 25 meters wide, will detect and trace particles called muons expected to be produced in particle collisions in the CERN accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

British physicist Peter Higgs said earlier this year that he was certain the new device would find a particle named the "Higgs boson," which is named after him. Also dubbed the "God particle," its existence was claimed by Higgs as far back as 1964, but using only scientific calculations.

The legendary physicist said that he would be very puzzled if the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will not find his namesake particle. Another team of researchers based at Fermilab in Chicago are also searching for it. They are using the Tevatron accelerator, currently the most powerful in the world, but its detection and data processing capabilities are nearly obsolete.

The project will look for signs of the Higgs particle, which is believed by some scientists to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. CERN said in its statement that its entire muon spectrometer system contains an area equal to three football fields, including 1.2 million independent electronic channels.

CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The United States is one of the Observers.