As physicists have delved deeper and deeper into nature’s mysteries, they have been forced to accept the unsettling fact that our universe is suspiciously fine-tuned to support life.
A proton travels around a 27-kilometer ring at nearly the speed of light. Along with a bunch of other protons, it passes through the hearts of each of a series of detectors more than ten thousand times per second. Then, on one pass, it slams into a proton coming from the other direction.
The United States has contributed the energy and expertise of hundreds of scientists and engineers, and more than half a billion dollars to the construction of the LHC particle collider and two of its experiments at the European laboratory CERN.
Walk into the main CERN cafeteria at various times of the day and you'll find different scenes: scientists discussing results over coffee; a parent coaxing his children to finish lunch before swooping them back to the nursery school on site; groups of grad students soaking up the sun on the
Building the parts for the Large Hadron Collider has presented challenges but taught many lessons for both particle physics laboratories and their industry partners.
The Large Hadron Collider, to start up in late 2007, traces its inception back to 1979. There are already more than 4000 papers in the SPIRES database that are about the LHC, either mentioning its name in the title or referring to it in a significant way.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.