Posts Tagged ‘physics’
LISA, the satellite that will change your universe
An earth-shattering revolution in physics, explained for the rest of us:
An Israeli on the Large Hadron Collider
We won’t pile on to the excitement about the imminent ignition of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Yes, we’ll witness phenomena that have not occurred almost since the Big Bang. Yes, we’ll finally be able to watch energy dissipate into additional dimensions, thus proving their existence. Yes, it will be the largest scientific experiment ever conducted, with thousands of scientists and billions of dollars at work. But you already know that, so why add needless banter? Because we found a nice Israeli spin on the LHC:
On September 10, 2008, Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Erez Etzion from the School of Physics and Astronomy will be in the control room of the new CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border of France and Switzerland when the LHC is first turned on. …
Of the 50 countries that have participated in the project, Israel is among those which have made the greatest contributions. Tel Aviv University in particular has played an essential role in constructing equipment for the collider tunnel, dug deep inside the Swiss-French Alps. …
Prof. Etzion, an experimental physicist in high-energy research, expects the impact of the LHC to be greater than that of the first moon landing. “It is hard to grasp the dimensions of the practical benefits from this project,” he says, “but we’re expecting to explore the basic forces that hold the world together.” …Prof. Erez Etzioni
Prof. Etzion participated in the design and construction of the trigger chambers for ATLAS, one of the two main detectors in the collider. This critical piece of machinery will decide what online data to record ― and what data to discard ― from the 1 billion atomic collisions per second. There is no storage disk space in the universe big enough to hold all the data, says Prof. Etzion, making this detector a key component in the success of the LHC. …
Prof. Etzion will be watching closely to see what happens to proton beams colliding at super speeds. While invisible particles are expected to leave a trace like a watermark after they collide, he believes that some particles will escape detection, possibly travelling to other dimensions.
