Bigger Is Better
To have a chance at achieving these goals, The LHC needed to be built larger than any previous particle accelerator ever built, By contrast, the first one, made in the early 1930s, could fit in the hand of its inventors. A long the LHC's 27-kilometer circumference are 1,600 massive magnets, most half the length of a basketball count and weighing 30 tons.
To record evidence of the tiniest particles on Earth, detecting machines must be immense.
The largest, called ATLAS. has a detector that's seven stories tall. the heaviest, known as CMS, is heavier than Eiffel Tower.
A machine of this incredible size and power can be dangerous, so building the LHC in a tunnel was prudent. The intense particle beam could drill a hole in just about anything. There are also concerns that the LHC experiments could create unwelcome discoveries, such as particles and other strange phenomena that could destroy Earth or even the universe.
For example, one nightmare scenario is that the collisions could pack matter together so tightly that it collapscs to form miniature black holes, Black holes are unimaginably dense points in space whose gravity is so strong it can pull in entire planets or even stars. The black holes could pull in our entire planet, eventually crushing it down to a size smaller than a pea.
At CERN and elsewhere, however, scientists fell that such concerns are absurd. A statement from the American Physical Society explained that collisions just like those that will take place in the LHC have taken place daily on the surface of the Earth for billions of years. There,high energy particles zoom in from outer space to smash into the earth, creating collisions of even higher energy than those in the LHC