Time Machine: CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Look closely.
This is what the world's first Time Machine may look like

Never heard of "traversable wormholes?"

Well, soon you might start hearing about them, as the world's most powerful particle accelerator becomes functional this spring - unleashing forces, capable of distorting not only space (just like gravity distorts space around Earth), but also TIME


CERN's Large Hadron Collider is set to become the very first time machine in history.

According to the research published by Irina Arefieva and Igor Volovich, "in general relativity, a time-like curve in space-time will run from past to future. But in some space-times the curves can intersect themselves, giving a closed-like curve, which is interpreted as a time machine - which suggests the possibility of time travel"

Two proton beams travel in opposite directions and collide at four points along the way - replicating the Big Bang conditions of "cosmic plasma", a mysterious almost liquid state, which occurred before quarks had cooled off enough to allow atoms to form together. The Large Hadron Collider will force quarks to break free of their bonds, the matter substance to unravel - to recreate the original "cosmic plasma", and to reconstruct Big Bang conditions. (hopefully on a much smaller scale)

Here are some quick facts:
- 20-year work-in-progress
- A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations
- 27 kilometers in circumference, 175 meters underground
- facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light
- each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
- temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core
- superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space

The most complicated thing that humans have ever built

To better appreciate the enormous scale of this beast, consider that it runs 17 miles across the border of two countries, has detectors in four locations the size of buildings, housed in huge caverns - and if you happen to be inside the tunnel while this thing is in operation, you would have a highly radioactive - and fatal - experience.

Just one superconducting solenoid (CMS) contains in it more iron than the Eiffel Tower. The cost of building LHC is so high, that America had to put a stop to its own Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 (even though 14 miles of tunnel had already been dug in Texas), so today CERN's structure is the lone contender for the title "the most complicated thing that humans have ever built".

The idea is to focus all this incredible energy into the smallest space possible. As they say, "the more energy goes in, the more massive the particles that come out". How massive? How about a miniature black hole?





If not time-travel, other exciting thing produced by LHC may be:
The end of the world as we know it

Apologies for a sensationalist headline, but how would you like a miniature Big Bang generated in your community, with scientists going around in little black vans with blaring loudspeakers: "Everything is under control, remain calm, look for a miniature blackhole in your kitchen sink"?

All jokes aside, scientists do expect excitement, but of the containable kind. The well-known reasons behind building LHC are finding the "God Particle" (Higgs Boson?) and coming up with the "Grand Unified Theory" of all forces of the Universe. For the estimation of dangers associated with LHC, read this paper abstract.

All other weird notions that LHC may produce uncontrollable Medium-sized Bang, or a bad-mannered black hole, are put to rest by CERN scientists: they assure us that "even if black holes will be produced, they will be too small and too short-lived to generate a strong gravitational force." In other words, Geneva is not going to get sucked into anything cosmologically weird.

Good.

Discover Magazine puts it: "The collisions at LHC could spray out strange new kinds of matter, unfurl hidden dimensions of space, even generate tiny glowing reenactments of the birth of the universe." And now, as we have seen - it may even facilitate time travel.

"We don’t even know what to expect," says French physicist Yves Schutz. "We’re now in a domain of energy that nobody has ever explored."