On Tuesday, July 5, at a giant underground compound in Meyrin, Switzerland, physicists announced that they had discovered three "exotic" particles.
The discovery of three new particles probably didn't live up to the promise of a portal that's gonna open on July 5, or the widely shared notion that the event would look like a clip from a movie.
Since Bill Clinton was president, people have been hyperventilating about this very, very big particle accelerator. The Italian physicist Francesco Calogero wrote an essay in 2000 about the possibility of a laboratory experiment destroying the planet.
John Oliver did a segment on The Daily Show in which he interviewed a science teacher who believed that the experiments had a one in two chance of creating an Earth- destroying black hole. The scientists interviewed by Oliver were more reassuring and less funny than the ones he interviewed.
Earth is still here despite the fact that no one has been able to see black holes. Two researchers proposed in 2011. Mini black holes don't bother anyone.
The purpose of the LHC was to figure out why matter has mass.
The director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, announced in 2012 that his team had found the elusive particle. Using the LHC to smash particles together, as scary as that may be to some, was the fastest way to observe the Higgs field, a theoretical energy field that underlies everything. The particle Heuer and his team observed in 2012 matched theoretical calculations by British physicist Peter Higgs who had first proposed the existence of such a field.
The team from CERN was ignored by the foundation. Maybe they were angry about it.
When the LHC was first launched, there were hopes that it would answer an obscure question that few people had ever wondered about. It may advance our understanding of other dimensions. Others wanted it to reveal the secrets of dark matter. In 2016 the whole system was shut down after a weasel got into the wiring and died.
"Let's be honest: It's disappointing," said Hossenfelder, a physicist and researcher.
It was taken offline for improvements. The press release stated that the outage would last for two years. It would achieve higher beam intensities once it was revived.
The LHC has been offline for a long time. The discovery of a previously undiscovered type of "pentaquark" and two new "tetraquarks" is being hailed as a success by the organization.
Does that mean that the LHC is going to open up a portal and zap a demogorgon into us? We should probably temper our expectations since the LHC had already made discoveries in the past.
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