A $10 billion machine that smashes particles together is shutting down this weekend, taking a staycation in its 17-mile tunnel near the French-Swiss border while receiving maintenance and upgrades.
The Large Hadron Collider, one of the world's largest science experiments, will resume operations in 2014 or 2015 at unprecedented energies.Do you care?Judging from the many comments that we get at CNN.com about what people perceive as a "waste" of money for scientific exploration, you might not. That may be because what happens at the LHC seems far removed from everyday life, and even farther from the study of stars.
"Everybody is, in some sense, an amateur astronomer. We all look up at the stars and wonder how the universe works," says Joel Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "People are not amateur particle physicists."Our window into outer space is visible and dazzling. We can see spaceships and telescopes launch into the sky, and we can see the images they send back.
Inner space, the fundamental building-blocks of everything on a ridiculously small scale, isn't visible. A lot of our understanding is based on theory and probability. Even the greatest achievement at the LHC isn't certain; we can only say that a particle was found resembling a theorized entity called the Higgs boson.But exploring the very small and the very big and distant are both important for understanding the world in which we live, scientists say, and are necessary for completing the same puzzle.
"The basic story is really that understanding particles and interactions helps us understand the evolution and structure of the whole universe, and hopefully will give us technologies that will allow us to explore it more efficiently and solve energy problems and so forth," said Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, a large particle detector.
What the universe is made.
Over the last few decades, scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe's composition is only about 5% atoms -- in other words, the stuff that we see and know around us. That means the rest is stuff we can't see. About 71% is something called "dark energy," and another 24% is "dark matter."