Inspiring Science and Engineering: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

By Keith A Griffiths

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator.

It lies up to 175 metres deep in parts below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva in Switzerland and it's tunnel has a circumference of 27 kilometres.

This huge piece of engineering was collaborated on by over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries.

It was build with the aim of exploring many physics theories in the area of physics.

The Higgs Bozon is known by many as the God Particle and is said to contain enough energy to propel us into a new age. The discovery of such a particle could in fact create a new pathway in relation to how we power our day to day luxuries, such as our homes, cars, motorbikes, ovens, gadgets, swimming pools, 'if you're lucky enough to have one', I could go on here.

So how close are we to discovering this exiting particle? Well in fact after smashing electrons into themselves at very high speeds there have been moments where we came close, but at his moment not close enough.

What could happen if anything went wrong, well there is a slim chance a black hole will appear, it's nice to know people asked my opinion before building this...

But what does it actually do?

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator - a device that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well defined beams.

The charged particles are accelerated and energised to very high speeds and then made to collide with other particles. The purpose of this collision is to allow scientists to view the byproducts created from the collision, these byproducts give us great insight into the sub-atomic world and the laws and behaviours of these sub-atomic particles.

The LHC is expected to answer many of the most fundamental questions in physics and give us greater insight into the workings of nature.

These questions cover such things as the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity, the deep structure of space and time and the nature of dark matter. This amazing piece of science and engineering has already had a huge impact upon the science world with breakthroughs such as locating the Higgs Bozon, who knows what else will be discovered in this ground breaking area of science.

The Higgs Bozon is known as the god particle as it's said to contain the energy used at the start of the big bang, by finding this particle it will help scientists to create new forms of renewable clean energy as well as other possibilities such as space travel