The Large Hadron Collider Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest engineering project ever undertaken, and one of the most expensive. Why are physicists around the world so excited about it? What secrets of the universe does this gargantuan piece of machinery hope to reveal
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Martin Beech
The Large Hadron Collider Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe
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Martin Beech McDougall Crescent 149 S4S 0A2 Regina Saskatchewan Canada [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-5667-5 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-5668-2 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5668-2 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931433 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
This book is dedicated to my parents, Leonard and Irene Beech. For their many years of patient support and encouragement, I am grateful.
Preface
The Discarded Image was the last book that C. S. Lewis, perhaps better known for his Narnia series of stories, wrote. In this final tome, published in 1964, Lewis reflected upon many decades of lecturing, scholarly research, and philosophical thought. The “image” that Lewis was concerned with was that of the medieval universe, and specifically its complete, compact, and fully determined form. Indeed, the image of the medieval universe is the very antithesis of the one that we have today. Although our universe is inconceivably large, nowhere near fully surveyed, only partially explained, and full of surprises, it does have one parallel with the medieval image: all is connected, and as every medieval astronomer knew, within the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm and visa versa. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment now under commission at CERN [Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléair]1 is just a modern-day continuation of this basic ancient tenet, and even though conceived and constructed to test the best present theories of particle physics, the results from the LHC will provide fundamentally new insights into the origin of the universe and its observed large-scale structure. All is connected. This book will be concerned with the fleshing out of a new image that binds together the macrocosm (the universe) and the microcosm (the world of elementary particles). Our task in the pages that follow will be to “un-weave” the fabric of the universe, and to thereby tease out the intricate strands that connect the Standard Model of particle physics (and its many present possible extensions) to the observed cosmos around us. For indeed, it is now abundantly cl
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