DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Scared for black holes? The ATLAS experiment begins!

**Dvjkefdw** · 08-22-2008, 04:05 PM

It's not meant to generate a mini Big Bang - the LHC is 'just' a proton/antiproton accelerator that's replaced the previous electron/positron accelerator, the LEP. Other than the particles used, the only significant difference is the energy levels the particles will reach prior to the streams being collided. The LEP maxed out at around 200GeV whereas the LHC is expected to kick off at around 15TeV (75 times more energetic) - at those levels, new particles are expected to be discovered such as the Higgs boson or perhaps even magnetic monopoles.

However, all of this is well short of making a mini Big Bang; 15TeV is still a factor of 100 times less energetic than the proposed time after the Big Bang where the fundamental forces started to separate. But that's the LHC's target: to probe the theorised energy levels of that time, to try and understand if a grand unified theory of the fundamental forces exists and what it might be like.

The whole machine is based on a theory so lets hope for the creators they didn't mess up.. Cars, PCs, kettles and pens are all based on theory too and they work

. Seriously though, the new LHC is essentially just a bigger/better version of what they had before (the LEP), so it's not as if the theory is untested.

08-22-2008, 04:05 PM	#12
Dvjkefdw Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 521 Senior Member	It's not meant to generate a mini Big Bang - the LHC is 'just' a proton/antiproton accelerator that's replaced the previous electron/positron accelerator, the LEP. Other than the particles used, the only significant difference is the energy levels the particles will reach prior to the streams being collided. The LEP maxed out at around 200GeV whereas the LHC is expected to kick off at around 15TeV (75 times more energetic) - at those levels, new particles are expected to be discovered such as the Higgs boson or perhaps even magnetic monopoles. However, all of this is well short of making a mini Big Bang; 15TeV is still a factor of 100 times less energetic than the proposed time after the Big Bang where the fundamental forces started to separate. But that's the LHC's target: to probe the theorised energy levels of that time, to try and understand if a grand unified theory of the fundamental forces exists and what it might be like. The whole machine is based on a theory so lets hope for the creators they didn't mess up.. Cars, PCs, kettles and pens are all based on theory too and they work . Seriously though, the new LHC is essentially just a bigger/better version of what they had before (the LEP), so it's not as if the theory is untested.
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