Moondark for October: The Coolest Place on Earth  
That caught my eye. I’d Googled for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research to catch the latest update on the Large Hadron Collider. It works (but see below), and so far, it hasn’t produced any micro black holes, strangelets, magnetic monopoles or vacuum bubbles that swallow the Earth and end life as we know it. Or anything very dramatic at all like that.

You probably already know that the LHC is the particle physicists’ latest toy. Spanning the French-Swiss border near Geneva, proton streams within the two evacuated rings will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light and shunted through one of a half-dozen detectors arranged around the rings. There the beams will collide head-on with one another or with specialized targets, and the resulting subatomic spew will be quantified and characterized. Speed is energy, and the LHC is a huge sledgehammer, focusing more energy in these collisions than ever before, at least since just after the Big Bang.

Everything about the LHC is huge. Costing an estimated € 3.2–6.4 billion (US$ 4.5-9.0 billion), the circular tunnels are 27 km (17 miles) in circumference and buried up to 100 m below ground. Over 1,600 superconducting magnets are kept below 2 °K by nearly 100 tonnes of liquid helium. Did you know that earth tide, the rising and falling of the Earth's crust due to the moon's gravitational attraction of about 10" or 25 cm, needs to be taken into account to precisely align the beam paths?

The goals are equally ambitious: the highest profile experiment seeks the Higgs boson, the last unobserved particle predicted by the Standard Model. Its existence, abundance and properties should shed light on why particles have mass, why gravity is weak compared to electromagnetic and nuclear forces, even what might be the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the other 95% of the Universe.

It’s readily understandable that the 8,000 scientists and Ph.D.’s find CERN and the LHC to be the coolest (if not the coldest) place on Earth. But why should they have all the fun? Did you realize that reading this article you’re using another of CERN’s inventions? Way back in 1991, the World Wide Web started as a internal networks to facilitate communication and data exchange among scientists. Sir Tim Berners-Lee first developed the language of the web, hypertext markup language, signified by the .html extension on this web page and visible in your browser if you select View > Page Source or Ctrl-U in Firefox and Google Chrome.

The web is indispensable to communication, information exchange and commerce for everyone nowadays, and certainly it is a great resource for armchair astronomers like me. All of the issues of this column have been created as web pages and none of them would be peppered with links without the web and it’s de facto main search engine interface, Google. (Go ahead and click: underlined links are active in the on line pdf version of the newsletter). Beginning with a collaboration by two Stanford University students, Google too has just had a birthday of its own on 7 September, number 10. In that short interval, Google has had its own big bang of sorts.

Google Inc.’s numbers are nothing if not impressive: revenue in the last 4 quarters totals $19.6 billion (that’s $2.2 million per hour), and its market value is $142 billion. This makes Google the fourth largest tech company after Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple. Google’s servers performed 48.7 billion searches in July, or 65 million per hour. Using the search term “astronomy,” Google found about 65,000,000 results. For “NASA,” 99,600,000, “JPL,” about 15,200,000, and for “Hubble Space Telescope,” 2,600,000.  Delmarva Stargazers comes in at around 4000, but the club’s home page tops that list.

On cloudy nights, take some time to explore both the universes of human astronomical knowledge and particle physics with these products of Europe’s investments in big science. Through the LHC@home distributed computing project, you can even participate in the data analysis. Stay tuned for preliminary reports of the Higgs boson from the LHC as the first high energy collisions are anticipated within the next two months. (Or maybe not: CNN, NYT, MSNBC.) And keep looking for clear skies as the weather here on Delmarva is anything but predictable. Here’s hoping the micro black holes don’t get us first!

 Google “Moondark,” and among the 42,000 hits, this home page usually appears somewhere in the top ten.  Moondark is written by Douglas C. Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 20 September 2008. Text on this web page is free for non-commercial use with attribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 License. Ask Doug about other uses.





Source: maps.google.com, CERN LHC web site and LHC FAQ, and the ATLAS Experiment