First Collisions At the LHC

An anonymous reader writes "At 1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) today, the first protons collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider. These first collisions, recorded by the LHC experiments, mark the start of the LHC's research program."

We hit 7 TeV, but how much more to go?

[nickfd]

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/03/30/lhc-research-program-launched-with-7-tev-collisions/ [symmetrymagazine.org] So according to that article, we did the colliding at 7 TeV and their next goal is 14 TeV in 2013, but it's not clear whether that level of 14 is equivilant to the "big bang". Does anyone know what we need to hit in energy levels to reach that?

Re:This may be the biggest experiment of all

[MozeeToby]

But how many of our theorized particles are actually detectable? It's all well and good to say that gravitons exist, but I don't think we're going to be building a detector the size of Jupiter and waiting around for a few thousands years to prove the idea are we? At some point we'll run out of detectable particles to detect.

Re:We hit 7 TeV, but how much more to go?

[L4t3r4lu5]

How fast is "really really really fast" in the planck epoch? Would I be right in assuming that prior to 10^-6 seconds there was zero mass in the universe, and therefore everything could travel many times the speed of light?

Forgive me if it's a dumb question; Physics major, I aren't.

Re:We hit 7 TeV, but how much more to go?

[Tyler Durden]

Just curious, but what source are you using for this timeline? I've heard the same thing described with small variations between them here and there, and I'm trying to figure out which is believed to be the most accurate of them so far. In the one I remember the most, all of the initial hydrogen and helium nuclei (with tiny amounts of heavier atomic nuclei) were formed within the first three minutes of the initial bang. Things didn't cool off enough for the electrons to join them to form atoms until around 380,000 years after t0.

Re:This may be the biggest experiment of all

[hey!]

Or not ... as the case may be. Computer Science has convinced me that a theory of everything might not be a practical development even if we knew all the relevant fundamental laws.

Let's say that in principle we learn something that allows us to calculate a formula to unify gravitation and electromagnetism. We don't know whether that formula is decidable, whether its membership in the set of correct formulae can be computed. Even if it is decidable, it might belong to a complexity class like EXPTIME-COMPLETE. Even if we built a quantum computer that could give us the formula, we might not be able to conform the correctness of that formula except by appealing to that same computer.