News Blip: LHC

The Large Hadron Collider was such massive news that it definitely needs its own article.

LHC will reveal to us details about dark and antimatter. It's like an opportunity to replicate some never before-seen conditions, and answer millions of unknown questions; doing that, sometimes scares people! haha.

It excites me and most scientists, too, though.

Basically it gives us an inside look into how the universe was created, re-manufacturing some big-bang like instances that will answer jumbles of of scientific questions, clarify models (like the Stand Model) that were purely theoretical practically, and illuminate a lot of "shaky and uncertain" areas of science. Basically the LHC will provide is with a "Director's Cut Edition" on the making of the movie of the "Universe". haha!

Here's the breakdown of what the components will do. They basically track different things, some of which we haven't ever known about until now.

Anti-matter tracking -- LHCb is in charge of this. We've got a TON of matter in the universe, but can't seem to find the anti-matter! The big bang had equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, but all we've been able to put our fingers on is matter. LHCb will track where the anti-matter goes in the miniaturized, microscopic Big Bang replica.

Quark-Gluon Plasma tracking -- ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) will track liquid-like plasma that existed ONLy after the big bang, so that'll clear that up.

Dark Matter & Higgs Boson tracking -- CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) both function as the core kind of general all-purpose tracking dark matter and the so-called "god particle". Understanding the Higgs Boson particle's (the only unobserved particle of the Standard Model) role in the univese could reveal how massless energy transformed into mass.

Other Dimension, Origins of Matter, and new Physics tracking -- ATLAS will scope out all of these new ground-breaking discoveries.

The Higgs Boson particle (along with quarks, leptons, photons, and gluon particles) is a key particle in the Standard Model, but unlike all the other 4, it's purely theoretical. The LHC will hopefully prove the existence of the Higgs Boson, completing a major puzzle piece to the cosmological big picture.

While the LHC Rap video


is award-winning, this debriefing



is the most ilustrative I've seen.

Finally, this video


had some great invterviews from an eclectic handful of CERN scientists and physicists.