We still don't understand the mass of the Higgs boson. We don't understand the family problem, as in why there are three families of particles,” said CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti. “So, studying the Higgs boson with the highest possible precision is a must, and a future collider will do so.”

Remember that cosmic rays are mostly protons. That's because almost all of the matter in the universe is hydrogen, which consists of a single proton and a single electron. When they hit the Earth's atmosphere, they collide with nitrogen or oxygen or other atoms, which are composed of protons and neutrons. Accordingly, cosmic rays hitting the Earth are just two protons slamming together — this is exactly what is happening inside the LHC. Two protons slamming together. What makes this colander and pour bowl set my favorite, as well as Rosner’s, is a combination of clever design; ease of use; and bright, fun color options that are a pleasure to have on the counter. I switched out my metal colander for this combo because I felt that the metal retained heat for too long, meaning I would frequently burn myself when I went to grab some strained beans or pasta. This set solves that problem and offers a solution if your sink is full of dishes: You can simply strain the liquid into the bowl beneath and worry about it later. It also means that this is an effective tool for both straining and draining. However, the price of exploring the unknown often doesn’t come cheap. With at least a 10-figure price tag, scientists and engineers are debating whether the endeavor will be worth the investment. The good Cutting-edge science is an exploration of the unknown; an intellectual step into the frontier of human knowledge. Such studies provide great excitement for those of us passionate about understanding the world around us, but some are apprehensive of the unknown and wonder if new and powerful science, and the facilities where it is explored, could be dangerous. Some even go so far as to ask whether one of humanity's most ambitious research projects could even pose an existential threat to the Earth itself. So let's ask that question now and get it out of the way. Can a supercollider end life on Earth? No. Of course not.But there is no evidence that strangelets are real, so that might be enough to keep some people from worrying. However, it's still true that the LHC is a machine of discovery and maybe it could actually make a strangelet … well, if they really exist. After all, strangelets haven't been definitively ruled out and some theories favor them. However, an earlier particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider went looking for them and came up empty. The ATLAS detector (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the LHC’s general-purpose detectors. (Image credit: xenotar via Getty Images) One of the key mysteries of the universe is the striking asymmetry between matter and antimatter — why it contains so much more of the former than the latter. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe must have started with equal amounts of both. Yet very early on, probably within the first second, virtually all the antimatter had disappeared, and only the normal matter we see today was left. This asymmetry has been given the technical name 'CP violation', and studying it is one of the main aims of the Large Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment. Skeptics have proposed that the LHC would produce many possible dangers, ranging from the vague fear of the unknown to some that are strangely specific. And, occasionally, that inconvenient bit of matter is the Earth. We call these intergalactic bullets — mostly high-energy protons — "cosmic rays." Cosmic rays carry a range of energies, from the almost negligible, to energies that absolutely dwarf those of the LHC.

Many of the LHC's most important experiments, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, utilize the general-purpose detectors ATLAS and CMS. But it also has several other more specialized detectors that can be used in specific types of experiments. Cosmic rays hit the Earth, the sun, other stars and all the myriad denizens of the universe with energies that far exceed those of the LHC. This happens all the time. If there were any danger, we would see some of these objects disappearing before our eyes. And yet we don't. Thus, we can conclude that whatever happens in the LHC, it poses exactly, precisely, inarguably, zero danger. And you can't forget the crucial point that this argument works for all conceivable dangers, including those that nobody has imagined yet.

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One of the leading theories beyond the Standard Model is known as supersymmetry. Seemingly abstract at first glance, the basic concept of supersymmetry is actually rather straightforward. Supersymmetry predicts that for each of the 17 fundamental particles in the Standard Model, there exist a hypothetical partner particle -- thus the “symmetry” -- and each of these hypothetical particles would be heavier than their corresponding, already discovered partner -- thus the “super.” As the name suggests, Run 3 is the third science run of the LHC and will begin on July 5, 2022. It will build on LHC's discoveries made during its Run 1 (2009-2013) and Run 2 (2015 to 2018) and perform experiments through 2024. Another proposed danger is a thing called a strangelet. A strangelet is a hypothetical subatomic particle composed of roughly an equal number of up, down and strange quarks.

To increase the energy of the proton beams to such an extreme level, "the thousands of superconducting magnets, whose fields direct the beams around their trajectory, need to grow accustomed to much stronger currents after a long period of inactivity during LS2," the same CERN statement read. Getting the equipment up to speed in this upgrade is a process that CERN calls "magnet training" and which is made up of about 12,000 individual tests. Both projects are now still in the research and development phase, but with a construction timeline planned to begin in the next decade, the projects will likely attract more scrutiny as their proponents attempt to secure funding.The purpose of MoEDAL is to look out for any monopoles that might be created in collisions inside the LHC. It could also potentially detect certain "stable massive particles" that are predicted by theories beyond the Standard Model. If it's successful in finding any of these particles, MoEDAL could help to resolve fundamental questions such as the existence of other dimensions or the nature of dark matter. Climate science LHC Safety Assessment Group " Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions Addendum on strangelets". June 2008. A third experiment optimized for the forward direction is Total Elastic and diffractive cross-section Measurement (TOTEM), located near the CMS interaction point, which focuses on the physics of the high-energy protons themselves.

With LHC's magnets "trained" and the proton beams more powerful than ever, the LHC will be able to create collisions at higher energies than ever before, expanding the possibilities for what scientists using the upgraded equipment might find. Tian Yu Cao, a philosopher of science and politics from Boston University, is pessimistic about the future of China's Circular Electron Positron Collider, or CEPC. He pointed to China’s last Five-Year Plan published in 2016, which did not mention the CEPC among the 10 flagship projects announced in the report. Antimatter often pops into existence inside CERN’s high-energy accelerators, as one-half of a particle-antiparticle pair. But in the usual course of events, the antiparticles don’t last long before they’re annihilated in collisions with ordinary particles. When Run 3 commences we can expect a whole new spate of discoveries, so it's a good time to take a closer look at what makes the LHC — and the rest of CERN — so unique. What is the Large Hadron Collider?If you see a news headline about exotic new subatomic particles, the chances are the discovery was made at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located near Geneva in Switzerland. And it is that last worry that could have potentially been so troubling to the LHC's creators. When you don't know what you don't know, you … well … you don't know. Such a question requires a powerful and definitive answer. And here it is… Why the LHC is totally safe Further, we can expand the number of cosmic targets to include neutron stars, which consist of matter so dense that whatever potentially dangerous thing we might consider will stop dead in the neutron star right after it is made. And yet the sun and the neutron stars we see in the universe all are still there. They haven't disappeared. Safety assured! Inside Science) -- In 2012, particle physicists detected the long-sought-after Higgs boson for the first time. This particle was the last missing puzzle piece of what physicists call the Standard Model -- the most thoroughly tested set of physical laws that govern our universe. The Higgs discovery was made possible by a giant machine in Europe, known as the Large Hadron Collider that uses a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets to accelerate and then smash particles together at near the speed of light.