The Large Hadron Collider: The Biggest Machine Ever Built: How It Was Built, How It Works, and Why Ten Thousand Scientists Spent Thirty Years Chasing ... a Ten-Billionth of a Trillionth of a Second - Couverture souple

Huynh, Kiet

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798172982880

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

At 1.9 kelvin, the ring under the Swiss-French border is colder than the empty space between the stars. At 8.33 tesla, its magnets pull harder than a hospital MRI multiplied five times over. And at the center of it, on July 4, 2012, two experiments that had spent eighteen years watching for it finally saw a particle that lives for about a ten-billionth of a trillionth of a second, then vanishes before light can cross a single atom.

Other books about the Large Hadron Collider tell you it happened. This one explains how: 136 figures built for it, 87 of them diagrams, charts, and maps drawn from CERN's own published numbers, across a machine explained mechanism by mechanism, with no equation in the text.

Inside, you'll find:

• The ring, measured honestly. 26,659 meters around, bored mostly for a different, older machine, holding 1,232 dipole magnets that alone account for 69 percent of its length.
• The cold, explained. 1.9 kelvin, reached with 120 metric tons of liquid helium, so the magnets can carry current with no resistance at all -- and so a bent beam does not simply melt its own pipe.
• The bill, given honestly. CERN's own documents give three different figures for what the machine cost -- 4.332 billion Swiss francs by one accounting, 4.7 billion by another, close to 6 billion with every experiment included. This book states which is which and why they differ, rather than picking the one number that sounds cleanest.
• The accident nobody hides. On September 19, 2008, nine days after first beam, a single bad electrical splice took the machine down for fourteen months. The book tells you what failed, what it cost, and what changed afterward.
• The discovery, and what it actually took. Five sigma, a one-in-3.5-million chance of a false alarm, reached only after sifting through quadrillions of collisions for a particle that keeps almost none of itself around long enough to be seen directly.

This book assumes no physics. It assumes you have heard "Higgs boson" often enough to feel a little embarrassed not knowing what it means, and it starts from there.

Ten thousand scientists. Thirty years, counted from the idea rather than the vote. One machine, still running.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798172982880
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 282
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg