1. What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Comment #175703 by auralblip on May 5, 2008 at 10:51 pm

In answer to the point about LHC being hyped out of proportion:

I agree that some times big experiments like these get completely blown out of proportion in the PR but I don't think this is one of them. I was able to visit CERN on their last open day a few weeks ago and I have to say it's scarily impressive what they are doing. It's difficult to really get the scale just from reading and watching these presentations. We visited the atlas detector (looking for the Higgs boson amongst other things) and once you are up close you realise how much effort has gone into just this alone. It's huge. But even the mundane stuff is a major engineering feat. The construction of the beam line itself is stupidly complicated, e.g. they have spent almost a year just heating up and cooling down the beamline to test everything is ok.

All this aside the real reason this is important is the fundamental questions the LHC is attempting to provide an answer too. Remember they are trying to understand why particles have mass, investigate cp-violation and many more fundamental physics questions.

While this is just another experiment, I would say that if they get answers to even one of the issues they are investigating it will enrich our understanding of the universe, isn't that worth it?