Why a Large Hadron Collider?
Seed asks some of the greatest physicists alive what we hope to learn from the LHC. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently under construction at CERN is the greatest basic science endeavor in history. Roughly half of the world’s particle physicists, 7,000 individuals, make the Collider their workplace. This single-minded group of men and women hails from more than 80 countries. They represent almost every religion and ethnicity on Earthembodying curiosity, cooperation, brilliance and ingenuity on the grandest scale. The LHC is a circular tunnel 27 km around, bisected by the Franco-Swiss border. Over 100-billion protons will traverse its pathways at near-light speed, guided by some 9,300 superconducting magnets, each weighing several tons and chilled to temperatures colder than deep space. At four points in the tunnels, the counter-revolving protons are to smash into one another at a rate of nearly one billion per second.
