And the Tortoise Moves Ahead with Grace…

“As particles pass through a magnetic field produced by superconducting magnets, this detector has the ability to accurately track them to the width of a human hair,” CERN said.

With continuous budget cuts affecting NASA and the scientific community of the United States, the world watches as 111 nations finish the last piece of an ambitious experiment which will unlock 96% of the Universe’s secrets. With precision team work and sheer dedication, this project has shown what international cooperation is all about as this experiment has grown from the most basic steps, to explain fundamental questions beginning with Isaac Newton’s law of gravity.

Over 7,000 scientists of all levels have worked in unison on one international level or another, assisting in the 10 billion project which took 13 years to prepare. Last Friday, the final piece—a 100-ton wheel– was lowered into an underground cavern for the ATLAS particle detector, used to measure particles called muons. The muons are produced in particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), referred to in an earlier article “Underground Building for Cosmic Secrets”, recreating conditions after the Big Bang by colliding two beams of particles at close to the speed of light.

The muon project, began about 20-years ago, in theory alone. But on March 21, 2005, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) was officially approved with funding by the UK’s science and innovation minister—using a new, dedicated muon beam line at the laboratory’s pulsed neutron and muon source, ISIS.

Starting up in the middle of 2008, it will take about a year for the experiment to produce results of “new physics”, with resulting new science to be effected for up to 20 years thereafter. The majority of the 7,000 to 10,000 scientists involved are from CERN’s European 20-member states; with Americans the largest single nationality of 1,000 scientists, followed by Russians. Could this be why the scientific community and NASA are no longer an issue? Why leave Earth when the same information regarding science can be found out here.

When the LHC is started up sometime this summer, according to Scientific Americana, about 38,000 tons of equipment will need to be cooled to minus 456 degrees F. in order for the magnets to operate in a superconducting state, a temperature that is colder than that of outer space.