The news from Geneva this week about activation of the Large Hadron Collider, an $8 billion scientific race track in which protons travel along a 17-mile long circular track beneath the Swiss-French border in hopes of providing information about fundamental elements of the universe, harkens up the hopes of North Carolina to host a similar scientific station beneath Durham and Granville counties more than two decades ago.
The Superconducting Super Collider, "a ring particle accelerator, proton-proton collider," in scientific terms, would have featured a tunnel with a circumference of 54 miles. It was proposed by a national study in 1982 and by 1987 the N.C. General Assembly was excited about the possibility that it could be located not far from the Research Triangle Park in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. North Carolina was one of seven states contending for the facility. Texas won the competition but the collider was abandoned in 1993 when Congress pulled the plug.
But scientists and engineers in Europe persevered over 14 years to build the Large Hadron Collider, which news reports said "is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the big bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature."
Observer wire reports went on, "The ... experiments could reveal more about 'dark matter,' antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle - the Higgs boson - which is sometimes called the 'God particle' because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe."
I won't pretend to understand that, either, but I can tell you that a lot of folks in North Carolina were intrigued by the whole idea. The Geneva collider features protons racing around the track at 11,000 time per second.
And as we recognize here in North Carolina, that's racin.'
