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Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - not yet ready - Doomsday postponed!
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CERN - Bubble chamber
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For those who are worried that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will destroy the planet, you can breath a little easier. It appears that the full force of this colossal machine will not be felt until well into 2012. In fact, some speculate that the LHC may never reach its full potential.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have devoted several articles to describing the science, technologies and alleged risks associated with the LHC (God Particle, Black Holes, Strangelets). My conclusions reflected in those articles were that the potential advances in physics are well worth the $9 billion investment while the feared dangers associated with the act of smashing protons at 99.999999% the speed of light were overblown. At full power, the LHC will not place our planet at risk. Some readers respectfully disagreed with my conclusions and I invite you to read their comments posted at the end of each of these three articles linked above.
This recent wrinkle regarding the timing and nature of the LHC restart comes almost one year after the machine was shut down after a splice between two magnets vaporized (in a display that would justice to a 4th of July extravaganza all be it underground and in a tunnel) and damaged dozens of expensive 35-ton magnets.
The LHC was originally designed to accelerate protons to energies of up to 7 trillion electrons volts and then smash them together in a search for conditions that existed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. According to officials at CERN, the European Center of Nuclear Research, the collider will be fired up in mid-November 2009 at only 3.5 trillion electron volts, about half the power of its original design. If all goes well, by the end of this year, CERN officials hope to ramp up the power to 5 trillion electron volts and will spend 2010 at about 70% of its designed power capacity.
Before the machine's power is cranked up to 100% capacity (7 trillion electron volts), the machine will experience a prolonged shutdown so that technicians can fix all the faulty splices between magnets which apparently exist throughout the entire 17 mile underground racetrack outside of Geneva Switzerland. It is estimated that up to 5000 splices will have to be redone and there is no guaranty that this repair will be successful enough to allow the Collider to reach its original goal of 7 trillion electron volts.
Perhaps the LHC won't reach full power until late 2012. Maybe not until December 21, 2012. Uh oh!
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