Knocking on Heaven's Door [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION We are poised on the edge of discovery. The biggest and most exciting experiments in particle physics and cosmology are under way and many of the world's most talented physicists and astronomers are focused on their implications. What scientists find within the next decade could provide clues that will ultimately change our view of the fundamental makeup of matter or even of space itself—and just might provide a more comprehensive picture of the nature of reality. Those of us who are focused on these developments don't anticipate that they will be mere postmodern additions. We look forward to discoveries that might introduce a dramatically different twenty-first-century paradigm for the universe's underlying construction—altering our picture of its basic architecture based on the insights that lie in store. September 10, 2008, marked the historic first trial run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Although the name—Large fiadron Collider— is literal but uninspired, the same is not true for the science we expect it to achieve, which should prove spectacular. The "large" refers to the collider—not to hadrons. The LfiC contains an enormous 26.6 kilometer' circular tunnel deep underground that stretches between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva and crosses the French-Swiss border. Electric fields inside this tunnel accelerate two beams, each consisting of billions of protons (which belong to a class of particles called hadrons— hence the collider's name), as they go around—about 11,000 times each second. The collider houses what are in many respects the biggest and most impressive experiments ever built. The goal is to perform detailed studies of the structure of matter at distances never before measured and at energies higher than have ever been explored before. These energies