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."
One of the first events seen in Atlas:
http://imgur.com/ugwnl.png
and in CMS:
http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/events/snapshotA.png
You can see the beam status here: http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1 and follow the webcast here http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/. The webcast screen also has links to each of the experiments.
It's turtles all the way down.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
There isn't really a limit. You just get closer and closer to t=0.
The big bang timeline goes roughly (listing the time when the mentioned period _ends_):
10^-43 seconds - Planck epoch - this is where we need string theory etc. The universe is expanding really really really fast. Frigging fast. This is called 'inflation'
10^-36 seconds - Grand unification epoch - this is where gravity starts to become seperate from the other forces
10^-12 seconds - The really-really-really-frigging-fast inflation is now over. We've now just got the normal expansion.
--- WE ARE HERE WITH THE LHC ---
10^-6 seconds - Higgs particles are now able to give particles mass. But too hot for quarks to combine into protons etc.
1 second - Quarks have now formed into protons etc
10 seconds - anti-matter is now annihalted somehow. All the protons etc have been created.
20 minutes - Hydrogen etc is formed. We now have real atoms! (Nucleosynthesis)