Kiwi has finger on Big Bang button
10 Sep 2008
A New Zealand scientist is one of the elite few driving the world's biggest experiment to recreate the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
Dr Alick Macpherson, from the small Canterbury town of Ashburton in the South Island, is one of seven scientists running the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border of France and Switzerland. The collider - due to be switched on soon - will send beams of protons circulating around a 27 kilometre-long underground ring near Geneva.
Dr Macpherson is engineer in charge of the collider and though his shifts at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) fall either side of the switch on, he will be briefing media.
"This is it," he said in an interview with New Zealand media. "This machine has been over 15 years in the design and building and now we're turning it on."
Safety standards
Asked about the possibility of the LHC unleashing a black hole to swallow the Earth, Dr Macpherson said: "We have been shown to meet all safety standards. In terms of the black-hole scenario, LHC is safe."
The first high-energy collisions, with proton beams smashed into each other to recreate the conditions of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang are due mid / late October.
Canterbury fellow
Dr Macpherson studied at Canterbury University in the South Island city of Christchurch. Canterbury is New Zealand’s second largest university, established in 1873 with a strong Department of Science.
He says the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a $NZ6.08b circular tunnel, 27km in circumference and between 50m and 175m underground. It smashes protons moving at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) into each other and recreates conditions a fraction of a second after the 'Big Bang' that is believed to have formed the universe about 13.61 billion to 13.85 billion years ago.
New Zealand input
The New Zealand Government formalised cooperation with Cern in December 2003. Scientists at Canterbury (South Island), Auckland and Massey (North Island) universities have been involved in building detector components for one of the two big experiments to be carried out on the LHC.
About $600,000 has been granted by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology for this work.
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