Welcome to CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter - the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States. - SOURCE

The Large Hadron Collider is a large physics project buried 100 metres underground on the French/Swiss border at CERN. It is based in a 27Km long tunnel and this picture is an artist's impression of the tunnel with an aerial view of the CERN site in the background. The red ring is marking where the tunnel is. Click the image to see a larger version.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. It lies in a tunnel under France and Switzerland.

The LHC is in the final stages of construction and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to their final operating temperature of approximately 2K. The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles. - SOURCE

Wormholes expected in Switzerland when Large Hadron Collider goes live
Written by Iain Thomson
vnunet.com, 08 Feb 2008

Russian scientists have claimed that time travel could take place this year as an inadvertent by-product of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run by Cern.

Mathematicians Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich said that when the LHC begins to smash atoms into each other the conditions will be perfect to open a wormhole into the distant future.

"Proton-proton collisions at the LHC could lead to the formation of time machines (space-time regions with closed time-like curves) which violate causality," said the scientists in a research paper.

"One model for the time machine is a traversable wormhole. We argue that the traversable wormhole production cross section at the LHC is of the same order as the cross section for black hole production."

The other possibility, according to the mathematicians, is that miniature black holes will be formed under the French and Swiss countryside.

However, if the time machine hypothesis is correct we will not be seeing visitors from the future because the wormholes will be barely larger than atoms.

The LHC is the world's largest scientific instrument, consisting of a 27km loop 100 metres under the French and Swiss countryside. It is due to go live later this year.
 

Time Machine at the LHC
Authors: I.Ya. Aref'eva, I.V. Volovich
(Submitted on 15 Oct 2007 (v1), last revised 25 Oct 2007 (this version, v2))

    Abstract: Recently, black hole and brane production at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been widely discussed. We suggest that there is a possibility to test causality at the LHC. We argue that if the scale of quantum gravity is of the order of few TeVs, proton-proton collisions at the LHC could lead to the formation of time machines (spacetime regions with closed timelike curves) which violate causality. One model for the time machine is a traversable wormhole. We argue that the traversable wormhole production cross section at the LHC is of the same order as the cross section for the black hole production. Traversable wormholes assume violation of the null energy condition (NEC) and an exotic matter similar to the dark energy is required. Decay of the wormholes/time machines and signatures of time machine events at the LHC are discussed. 

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