Blinding energy

Scientists at LHC early on Tuesday watched the first images of collision of a pair of protons traveling at a third of the speed of light! That is an achievement for physicists.

The protons had been travelling in opposite directions around the collider's 17-mile track since ten days and on collision released 7 trillion electronic volts (7 TeV) of energy—three times more than the previous record.

Dubbed the world's largest scientific experiment, scientists hope the machine can approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.

CERN used powerful superconducting magnets, cooled to almost zero temperatures, to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles. When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

LHC operators plan to run the $10 bn collider almost continuously over the next 18 to 24 months. Fears of the earth and more being swallowed by any black holes created in the process of the collisions have been rubbished as the blackholes are very small and exists for a fraction of a second.

Why do particles weigh? If the Higgs particle is responsible, can we see it? Or will it, like God, remain unseen??! The answers provided by the discoveries of the LHC will revolutionize our understanding of how the universe works, and eventually tap yet another source of energy. Just try imagine what could be done with 7 TeV at hand! If we could harness it, store it and use it! That will take time. For now it is the world of physics that awaits ‘breaking’ news.