CERN's Large Hadron Collider

CERN is an European Organisation for nuclear research established in 1954 located in Geneva. All members are European countries such as Begium, UK, Italy , Norway, France and Germany, etc. CERN's achievements including the discovery of W and Z Bosons (elementary particles with weak force) and of course, the construction of the largest and highest energy collider - Hadron Collider.

Hadron collider is a circular structure about 27 km long and between 50 and 175 meters deep. It has two parallel pipes, in each of which a particle beam travels. These pipes intersect at four points where the beams travelling in opposite directions collide. Dipole and quadrupole magnets are used to bend  and focus the beams respectively. The collider is believed to generate 15 billion gigabytes of data. Protons (positively charge particles, belonged to a sub-atomic particle group called Baryons) are used in the recently publicised experiment. Six detectors are used to detect the collisions. Protons are accelerated with 7TeV (1eV = 1.6 x 10 ^ 9 Volts, T - 10 ^ 12 ) and move at 99.999999% of the speed of light. Off-course particles are absorbed by Collimators which use blocks of heavy materials or graphite to absorb the high energy particles, preventing them from damaging the collider. The first high energy collsion won't happen until October, 2008.

The idea is to collide sub-atomic particles to produce Higgs Bosons (theoretical massive scalar elementary particles as were produced by the postulated Big Bang which is thought to be the beginning of the Universe amd everything else including us - the humans and Star Wars????).

Honestly, I am not as excited as the scientists who made the above mentioned project possible. What are the implications besides satisfying academic and scientific curiosities? Call me short-sighted, does it solve the problems we face today? AIDS , cancer, ...... Alzheimer's disease....  Or is it trying to disprove the existence of God? If there is a god , who / what made him/her?? If there was a Big Bang, what was before it?? I guess there is a limit of the questions we are capable of asking. If there are answers to these questions, are we capable of comprehending them?

As far as I am concerned, it is one big expensive race track (9 billion US, I guess Bill Gates could pay for it).