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I don't know if anything is fater than it, but I think light can bent by gravity. Isn't a black hole just a big gravity well? It sucks everything into it.
Nice - Thanks for that, since every weapon ever invented has a foundation in physics. I wasn't commenting on other possible uses of this study.
What the heck will smashing sub-atomic particles together prove??? Am I the only one that is bored as nuts with scientists trying to "prove" where the earth/universe/life came from???
Don't worry guys...
I'm only 120 km from Geneva, if things goes wrong and I'll see the Alps collapse at morning when I drive to work I'll shoot a post here so that those who will have some more time to live may find the best way to use it...
MK .... you're to smart a person to be asking such a sophomoric question like that.
If the scientists find a way to disrupt/alter the strong or weak nuclear force, could lead to some interesting possibilities
Jeez don't ask me I was brutal in physics in school , but there are articles out there that will make more sense then by babblingObviously not. You want to pursue such technology to develop a possible weapon or energy production, fine - I get it. But, what benefit will help humanity to know what happened in a fraction of a second after the big bang?
The way I look at it - there are people dying of uncurable diseases and other important issues that deserve limited attention, research, and resources. What will knowing this fraction of a second do for us?
How Gravity Affects Photons for gravity and light and there are things that are faster then lightNothing is faster than the speed of light because light will always move fast enough that it will catch any object moving at a given velocity. Einstien's theory of relativity.
Light isn't affected by gravity because it can act as a wave and a particle and when it interacts with gravity acts as a wave
and there are things that are faster then light
Then a small physics quiz
Is there anything faster then the speed of light
And is light affected by gravity
I'm trying to get the exact source I heard about this it is possible it was a laser beam in a medium I can't remember . Remember I flunked physics some 40 years agoWhich things are faster? As far as I know none have ever been found. Tachyons are pure hypothetical.
Nothing is faster than the speed of light because light will always move fast enough that it will catch any object moving at a given velocity. Einstien's theory of relativity.
Light isn't affected by gravity because it can act as a wave and a particle and when it interacts with gravity acts as a wave
Is anyone going to comment on what good knowing the fraction of a second after the big bang is supposed to bring to humanity? It's a serious question, and nobody has responded.
Particle physicists believe they will throw open a new frontier of knowledge on Wednesday when, 100 metres below ground, they switch on a mega-machine crafted to unveil the deepest mysteries of matter.
The most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, with the aim of filling gaps in our understanding of the cosmos.
It may also determine the outcome of novel theories about space-time: does another dimension - or dimensions - exist in parallel to our own?
After nearly two decades and 6 billion Swiss francs ($A6.6 billion), an army of 5,000 scientists, engineers and technicians drawn from nearly three dozen countries have brought the mammoth project close to fruition.
At 9.30am (1730 AEST) on Wednesday, the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometre ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Whizzed to within a millionth of a per cent of the speed of the light, the particles will be the first step in a long-term experiment to smash sub-atomic components together, briefly generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun in a microscopic space.
Analysts will then pore over the wreckage in the search for fundamental particles.
"We will be entering into a new territory of physics," said Peter Jenni, spokesman for ATLAS - one of four gargantuan laboratories installed on the ring where a swathe of delicate detectors will spot the collisions.
"Wednesday is a very major milestone."
The LHC is massively-muscled machine compared to its CERN predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider, and an ageing accelerator at the legendary Fermilab in Illinois.
It has the power to smash protons or ions - particles known as hadrons - together at a whopping 14 teraelectron volts (TeV), seven times the record held by Fermilab's Tevatron.
The leviathan scale of the project is neatly juxtaposed by its goal, which is to explore the infinitely small.
Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass.
In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.
Particles passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, which theoreticians dubbed the Higgs Boson.
The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "God Particle" - it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.
French physicist Yves Sacquin says that heroic work by the LEP and Fermilab has narrowed down the energy range at which the devious critter is likely to spotted.
Given the LHC's capabilities, "there's a very strong probability that it will be detected," he said.
Some experts are also hopeful about an early LHC breakthrough on the question of supersymmetry.
The supersymmetry theory goes way beyond even the Higgs. It postulates that particles in the Standard Model have related, but more massive, counterparts.
Such particles could explain the unsettling discovery of recent years that visible matter only accounts for some four per cent of the Universe. Enigmatic phenomena called dark matter and dark energy account for the rest.
CERN Director General Robert Aymar is confident the massive experiment will yield a correspondingly big breakthrough in penetrating these mysteries.
"It is certain that the LHC will yield the identity and understanding of this dark matter," he said in a video statement.
CERN has had to launch a PR campaign aimed at reassuring the public that the LHC will not create black holes that could engulf the planet or an unpleasant hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would turn the Earth into a lump of goo.
It has commissioned a panel to verify its calculations that such risks are, by any reasonable thinking, impossible, and France too has carried out its own safety probe.
Either way, the end of the world will not happen on Wednesday, for the simple reason that the LHC will not generate any collisions that day.
These will probably be initiated "in a few weeks" as part of a phased programme to commission the LHC, testing its equipment and evaluating work procedures before cranking it up to full strength, said Jenni.
Looking at the daily mountain of data that will have to be analysed, "it will take weeks or months before one can really hope to start discovering something new," he cautioned.
"The LHC is more than a machine. It is the intellectual quest of our age," the British weekly New Scientist said in this week's issue.
"With luck... today's physics textbooks will start to look out of date by the end of 2009."