September 10th marks the first test-run for
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
Doomsayers maintain it will cause the earth to be swallowed in a black hole and
are making desperate legal efforts to stop it. Scientists say the worst likely
outcome is a slow day on the Internet.
The largest acceleratometer complex in the world, capable of
accelerating protons to energy levels of 7 TeV, will get its first test “fire”
on Wednesday; although it is only being powered to 450 GeV, which is a tenth of
its capacity, and protons are being fired only one way, not to be collided at
all, there are those like former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and his
Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider, who claim it will cause the end of
the world. Scientists have faced everything from lawsuits to death threats, all
geared towards stopping the experiment. But what is really going to happen?
Scientists say there’s nothing to worry about, as the safety
of the project, 20 years in the making, has been thoroughly considered. Given,
it’s hard to explain the exact operation of the massive accelerator to someone
without a degree in particle physics, but scientists say that what it does
simply cannot generate a black hole, strangelets, or other phenomena capable of
rending the space-time continuum.
This has not stopped such fears emerging in the past
however, as Fermilab’s other particle accelerator, Tevatron, which has been
around since the ‘80s, has faced similar protests. So has the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York.
The fact that these similar devices have not destroyed the Earth does little to reassure those who think that scientists are playing God,
by pushing the limits of science and building such ever more complex and
powerful machines.
However, even if the LHC does not destroy the Earth, it may
ruin your bandwidth on Wednesday. Given the 15 petabytes or so of data that
will be generated by the LHC’s test run, the massive amount of data will be
processed by a global grid computing system composed of 60,000 computers placed
worldwide. This network will test and push the limits of the Internet, and in
and of itself may constitute the basis of a significant advance in information
technology, as the massive processor arrays dedicated to analyzing LHC data
redefine the meaning of looking for a needle in a haystack.
David Colling of Britain’s
Imperial College, which is a contributor to the LHC
grid, says that "The LHC experiment would not be possible without this
infrastructure, that's why particle physicists have really driven the Grid." He
adds that building a new computing system to process the data would have been
costly and impractical. Sharing the computing load also has the advantage that
each country involved has access to a part of the data and gets a portion of
the glory should a breakthrough be made.
According to the Economic Times: “Scientists expect grid
computing to become more widely used in future for research ranging from new
drugs to more effective nuclear power. Eventually, consumers will start seeing
it used in daily life to regulated traffic, predict the weather or even boost a
flagging economy.” It would seem that the search for the Higgs Boson may
inadvertently yield advances in computing as well. It wouldn’t be the first
time great advances in science have been made by accident....
