CERN’S 1st Attempt for LHC Beam Circulation on September 10, 2008
The endeavour of science brings nations together towards a common goal, and many of CERN’s experiments are international collaborations. The Laboratory welcomes many visiting physicists every year from all over the world. Some may stay for a seminar, whereas others may remain for months or even years working on an experiment.
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“The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe. A year from now, the world will still be here, ” said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN to NEW SCIENTIST last year, referring to when Luis Sancho, from Spain, and Hawaii resident Walter Wagner filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s US District Court against CERN and US contributors to the project demanding that they do not operate the LHC until they prove it is safe. The US contributors named are the Department of Energy (DoE), the National Science Foundation and Fermilab, an accelerator laboratory near Chicago.
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With the Large Hadron Collider considered as “THE” most powerful particle accelerator in the world, it stands to reason that when the news came out CERN will be making its first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC on September 10, 2008—it should not surprise anyone that it is not being well received by certain segments within the science community. Safety issues have been addressed for many years in regard to CERN’s LHC.
In fact, with new data coming forth with new experiments and a more theoretical understanding of the process, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) recently updated a 2003 analysis, made by a select group of independent scientists—the LHC Study Group. This new report was made due to the near completion at CERN of the Large LHC, with resulting higher energies than the averages of previous accelerators.
Because of safety issues about previous accelerators and questions about the LHC, the report was requested by CERN from the LHC Safety Study Group, with the conclusion there is absolutely no basis for a threats or danger from the LHC. This latest report has reaffirmed their 2003 report, extending their conclusions that the safety report was vital but nothing was found to warrant danger. What has many worried is that the LHC is known to achieve superior energy as no other particle accelerators ever have before. In fact, this is rather scary to most laymen, counting myself. But good ol’ Mother Nature, of course, can routinely produce superior results of higher energies in her cosmic ray collisions without anyone skipping a beat…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
