The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is no match for the moon.
That’s the observation of one of the scientists working on it, Dr. Pauline Gagnon, a physics professor at the University of Indiana Bloomington, who recently posted a blog entry describing a spatial surprise she encountered last weekend while running one of the six major ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-around underground accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland, which has been nicknamed the “Big Bang machine,” because it is designed to simulate the conditions of the early universe.As Gagnon recalled it, everything seemed to be going smoothly until the end of her shift, when another scientist called in to report unexpected fluctuations in the data coming from the planned collisions of two high-energy proton beams taking place in the accelerator. Take a look at the following graph to see the fluctuations, represented as dips.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=98221