It seems the large hadron collider has had no end of problems, which led some people to believe it was due to something in the future time travelling into the past to prevent its launch. But now it seems that it’s almost there as initial tests have finally succeeded.
CERN, the Swiss facility where the enormous underground experiment is located, has announced that test beams in the LHC have zoomed around most parts of the accelerator without incident:
Particles are smoothly making their way around the 27 km circumference of the LHC. Last weekend (7-8 November), the first bunches of injection energy protons completed their journey (anti-clockwise) through three octants of the LHC’s circumference and were dumped in a collimator just before entering the CMS cavern. The particles produced by the impact of the protons on the tertiary collimators (used to stop the beam) left their tracks in the calorimeters and the muon chambers of the experiment.
One of the coolest parts about accelerators is that when the microscopic particles smash into the walls, they are moving so fast that they leave long tracks in their wakes. (Researchers can gain information from examining these tracks.)
If everything keeps moving smoothly, we could see some particle-on-particle smashage as early as two weeks from now. As long as the world doesn’t end, we’re going to get some long-awaited answers to our questions about our universe.
Original article at io9
