Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson Audiobook
Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson Audiobook
- Byron Wagner
- Random House (Audio)
- 2010-10-05
- 8 h 30 min
Summary:
The Large Hadron Collider may be the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the Western Business for Nuclear Study, its audacious purpose is to re-create, within a 16.5-mile-long round tunnel beneath the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely sizzling and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the initial trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is currently crashing protons at record energy never about Present in the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson created by scientists before, and it will reach also higher levels by 2013. Its superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in opposing directions throughout the track. After accelerating the beams to 99.9999991 percent of the rate of light, it collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash of energy sufficient-in accordance with Einstein’s elegant statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2-to coalesce right into a shower of contaminants and phenomena which have not existed since the first moments of creation. Within the LHC’s detectors, scientists hope to observe empirical verification of key ideas in physics and cosmology.
In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated test in the annals of science, Amir D. Aczel requires us in the control rooms at CERN at key moments when a global team of best researchers begins to find whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its magnificent guarantee. Through the eyes and words from the men and women who conceived and built CERN as well as the LHC-and with the same clearness and depth of knowledge he shown in the bestselling Fermat’s Last Theorem-Aczel enriches most of us with a company grounding in the technological concepts we should appreciate the discoveries that may almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is certainly finally unleashed.
Can the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited appearance, confirming at last the Standard Style of particles and their interactions that’s among the fantastic theoretical achievements of twentieth-century physics? Will the concealed measurements posited by string theory end up being revealed? Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter which makes up a lot more than 90 percent from the cosmos? With Present on the Creation, written by among today’s finest popular interpreters of simple science, we are able to all adhere to the progress of the experiment that guarantees to greatly satisfy the interest of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein when he said, “I wish to understand God’s thoughts-the relax is details.”