well if any of u r familiar with the law of conservation and mass, then u know that it states that matter cannot be created from nothing, or completely destroyed. so evolutionists say this, then turn around and say the big bang created the universe as we know it. WTF!!?!?!?!the universe went from non existent to existent in a fraction of a nanosecond! and where did the bigbang come from? nothing? nope, because if the law of conservation and mass is true, then the bigbang isnt. simple...
"I WILL probably cry when we see the first collision," says Bilge Demirköz. After spending the best part of a decade designing detectors and writing computer code for them, the 28-year-old physicist is yet to get her hands on real data. That's about to change. In a matter of weeks, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will begin amassing enough data to keep physicists off the streets for decades.
It's an emotional time for Demirköz and thousands of others who have devoted the past few years of their lives to a machine that will change our understanding of reality. The LHC is the daddy of all particle accelerators. Its collisions will generate seven times the energy of its most powerful rival, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. By smashing together protons travelling just shy of the speed of light, the LHC will generate the largest concentration of energy ever seen in the lab - albeit in a region just billionths of the width of a speck of dust.
Smashing particles together is a tried-and-tested way of revealing what matter is ultimately made from, and what holds it together. Ernest Rutherford scored the first success nearly 100 years ago when he revealed the structure of the atom. Since then, physicists have been using accelerators to whip particles up to ever higher energies to explore even deeper into matter. At the highest energies, matter is smashed to smithereens, leaving behind fragments and energy that transform themselves into types of particles never seen before.
The LHC's microscopic fireball is the closest we can get to recreating conditions last seen less than a trillionth of a second after the big bang, when the particles and forces that shape today's universe began to emerge. The higher the collision energy, the more massive the particles created in the debris. So a host of hitherto unseen particles could materialise from the firestorm, providing physicists with important new leads in the quest to unite all the forces of nature, including gravity, into one "theory of everything".
The LHC might help us to finally crack what are arguably the biggest mysteries in physics, starting with the origin of mass and the disappearance of antimatter. It could reveal what makes up the majority of matter in the universe, the so-called dark matter that is invisible to our telescopes. And it might tell us about the very nature of space-time itself. Do extra dimensions of space exist in addition to the three we live in? Are there mini-black holes? The LHC is more than a machine. It is the intellectual quest of our age.
On 10 September the protons are set to make the first of the 11,000 or so laps they'll complete each second around the LHC's 27-kilometre ring (see diagram). Eventually proton beams travelling in the opposite direction will meet them head-on at four points in the ring where giant detectors - ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb - have been built to pore over the particle wreckage.
The universe won't be giving up its secrets to the LHC straight away, however. For a start, it will take two months just to get the proton beams colliding. Then, depending on how optimistic you are, physicists potentially face a five to 10-year slog before they know for sure whether the effort has paid off.
If nature is kind, and possibly a bit weird, the LHC will create particles we have never seen before within minutes of smashing its first protons. Finding those particles, however, is a different story. Most elementary particles fleet in and out of existence in less than a trillionth of a second, while some can pass through tens of metres of detector as if it wasn't there.
To be sure that what they're seeing is something new and not some familiar particle that blazes a similar trail, physicists will have to search the LHC's collisions for as many copies as possible. And that will take time.
In fact it could take years for CERN to announce a major discovery, especially when it comes to the Higgs boson - the earthly face of the mechanism thought to give particles their mass, and the main motivation for building the LHC in the first place. With luck, however, today's physics textbooks will start to look out of date by the end of 2009.
From day one, researchers will be scouring their detectors for distinctive patterns of energy and charge that scream "new physics". Realistically, though, they won't collect enough data in the first few months to be able to claim a discovery. What's more, no sensible scientist is going to announce a discovery until they are confident that they understand every last millimetre of their massively complex detectors.
