actual assignment 1

In a darkened classroom, against the backdrop of an uncooperative projector and a packed group of skeptical physics students Brian Cox gestures to the screen and states simply “It goes without saying that its the most complicated machine built”. Particle physicist Brian Cox was referring to the Large Hadron Collider to which he spoke about at New York University’s SHARP Lecture last Wednesday. The LHC is the world’s most powerful and largest particle accelerator, it circles in a circumference of 27 Kilometers(16.77 miles), is embedded 50 to 175 meters underground and straddles the border of Geneva and France. The LHC accelerates protons and lead ions at 99.999999% of the speed of light and then smashes them together to reenact the environment created right after Earth’s Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2003 to “understand what the world is made of, what the smallest building block of physics is”. That elementary building block was the “proton soup” produced when the Big Bang occurred. Cox explains that physicists are using the LHC to identify the Earth’s creation story where “we began with a soup of gluons”. In studying the origin of the world’s most basic material -gluons, protons, leptons and quarks physicists can then understand more complex physical relationships between matter. Also the LHC may produce Higgs boson particles, notoriously dubbed “dark matter” because of its presumed presence in the universe despite our inability to have ever seen, sensed or recorded it.
As a testament to the sheer enormity of the LHC, the particle detector that Cox works on ATLAS alone weighs more than 7716 tons and has the computing power of more than 5,000 PCs. The great size of the project hindered the repair process when in September 2008 a fault occurred on the LHC’s super conducting magnets. Brian’s Cox’s lecture takes place on the eve of the LHC’s return, it will be up and running again next month in March when physicists will continue their search for unprecedented discoveries with what Cox considers “the greatest scientific development of the 21st century”.