CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.
The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts — GREAT SCOTT!!!), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV.
But it’s not stopping there…eventually the LHC is heading towards a universe crushing 7 TeV!!!
Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.
Perhaps the time travelers that are supposed to be mucking up the works are on holiday this week.
Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson particle, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
Monday, November 30
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CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.
