Keesing's World News Archives » Breaking History  »  International  »  Scientific Research: Repairs to large hadron collider (pub. Dec. 17, 2008)  »  Scientific Research: Repairs to large hadron collider - timeline

Searching more than 75 years of world history

• September 2008. The LHC is shut down just a week after its inauguration, after a tonne of liquid helium leaks into the tunnel that contains the accelerator. It is expected that the experiment will be shut down until 2009 whilst repairs are carried out.
• March 2008. A last major component is installed in the LHC as two environmentalists seek a court restraining order against CERN, which they claim has not adequately assessed the risk that the LHC could create a tiny black hole that could destroy the Earth.
• June 2005. The six partners in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project agree to build the world's largest fusion reactor in Cadarache in southern France.
• December 2003. An international consortium, including the EU, the USA, Russia, and China, postpone a decision on where to build the world's biggest nuclear fusion reactor.
• September 2002. Two CERN experiments, ATHENA and ATRAP, take a major step towards understanding anti-matter by creating and trapping some 50,000 atoms of anti-hydrogen in a cold state.
• May 2001. CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee is honoured for his proposal made in 1990 to develop a distributed information system for CERN that later became the World Wide Web.
• August 2000. CERN scientists construct an experiment to use positrons and anti-protons to create anti-hydrogen atoms to study the properties of anti-matter. Scientists are trying understand why anti-matter, thought to exist at the onset of the universe, has all but vanished now.
• February 2000. CERN scientists succeed in recreating very briefly the conditions that existed at the supposed beginning of the universe in the first 10 microseconds after the "Big Bang". By colliding lead ions at almost the speed of light the experiments generated temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.
• October 1992. CERN physicist Georges Charpak receives the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention and development of particle detectors.
• October 1988. CERN scientist Jack Steinberger shares the Nobel Prize for Physics for discoveries about neutrinos.
• October 1984. CERN scientists Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer receive the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries about particles.
• October 1980. Researchers at Princeton University (USA) win the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering an imbalance between regular and anti-particles that could help explain why regular matter is more plentiful now than it was at the beginning of the universe.
• March 1978. US President Jimmy Carter signs the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, designed to ensure a halt in the spread of nuclear weapons while preserving peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
• October 1976. The Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) physicists Sam Ting and Burt Richter, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind", a composite of electrons and positrons.
• May 1974. India becomes the sixth nation in the world to explode a nuclear bomb.
• February 1971. CERN members agree to construct a 300 billion electronic-volt particle accelerator (Proton Synchrotro-PS), the worlds first proton-proton collider, to be located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.
• June 1968. The UK withdraws from CERN's plans to construct the world's biggest atomic accelerator.
• November 1959. The Proton Synchrotron (PS) accelerates protons for the first time, becoming the world's highest energy particle accelerator with a beam energy of 28 GeV (Giga electron volts). It becomes the centrepiece of CERN research for some time.
• September 1958. Research presented at the 2nd UN Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy describes experiences of existing nuclear fission reactors; the potential for fusion power; uses of nuclear energy for ship and aircraft propulsion; and nuclear applications in medicine. Meanwhile, the US and UK governments deepen their co-operation in the area of thermonuclear research.
• September 1956. Physicists at the University of California discover the anti-neutron, a new and hitherto unknown particle with the property of destroying matter in the ordinary state.
• October 1955. US researchers detect a new atomic particle, the "negative proton" or "anti-proton", in the nucleus or core of the atom with the aid of a new 1 billion electron-volt accelerator at the University of California.
• June 1955. Just days before his death, physicist Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity heralded the atomic age, signs a petition with a dozen other pioneering nuclear physicists decrying the threat that thermonuclear weapons pose to humanity.
• September 1954. Following ratification by France and Germany, CERN officially comes into being with 12 members. At the national level, French atomic policy officials announce the development of a powerful new atomic reactor.
• July 1954. Using high-altitude balloons to conduct their experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago, USA, intercept a speeding particle from outside the Earth's atmosphere. Its extreme speed leads scientists to conjecture the existence of "anti-protons", which annihilate the protons of atoms as they collide with them.
• November 1952. The USA explodes the first hydrogen bomb over the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The power of the explosion, had it occurred on land, would have caused absolute destruction over an area 5 km in all directions from the point of explosion.
• December 1951. UN officials decide to create a European nuclear research laboratory that will build cyclotrons (a type of particle accelerator) and sponsor experiments. An interim research institute in Copenhagen is established until the institution moves to its official headquarters later in the decade.
• May 1950. The accelerator at the Harwell (UK) atomic energy station moves atomic particles to almost the speed of light, which the government reports will open up research into atomic energy.
• January 1950. US Senate leaders and President Harry Truman affirm the US will pursue development of a hydrogen bomb, vastly more destructive than the atomic bombs dropped in 1945.
• September 1949. The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.
• December 1949. Louis de Broglie proposes the creation of a European nuclear laboratory, at the European Cultural Conference in Lausanne.
• June 1946. The US representative to the UN agency on atomic energy proposes putting atomic energy under international control.
• August 1945. US President Harry Truman discusses how UK and US researchers raced against German scientists to develop the first atomic bombs, and how US military laboratories were the sites of research leading to the discovery of the release of atomic energy.
• 1942-45. The US scientist Robert Oppenheimer leads an international team of scientists (the Manhattan Project) in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop a nuclear weapon.
• August 1937. California Institute of Technology professor Carl Anderson wins the Nobel Prize for Physics for proving the existence of Paul Dirac's previously theoretical anti-electrons (also called positrons).
• February 1937. Professor Paul Dirac of Cambridge University, UK, fundamentally alters current thinking on the structure of the universe and the nature of time. One of the consequences of his new theory is the discovery that matter must be increasing at a rate proportional to the square of the age of the universe.
• June 1933. University of California researcher Ernest Lawrence designs and builds the first "apparatus for the acceleration of ions" (also called a cyclotron).
• December 1931. Pioneering physicist Ernest Rutherford proves that gamma rays are not generated when waves disturb the ether; rather they arise from the alpha particles of the atom nucleus.
• March 1928. Dirac publishes his Quantum Theory of the Electron, which explains behavior of the electron, while forcing an abandonment of classical notions of space and energy transfer.
• 1907-1923. UK atomic researcher J.J. Thomson discovers the electron through observation of cathode rays, further supporting the corpuscular nature of matter and energy.
• 1910. Through experiments in which alpha particles are fired through very thin sheets of gold foil, Ernest Rutherford notes that collisions with the gold nuclei are rare, thus proving that most of the atom is open space, except for a minute positively charged nucleus.
• 1905. Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity suggests an interchanging relation of energy and matter under extreme conditions.
• 1900. German physicist Max Planck proposes his quantum theory to the German Physical Society. The theory, first put forward to describe heat radiation, is found applicable to all known physical and chemical phenomena on an atomic scale. Planck's formula states that energy is not liberated by a continuous process but is emitted in a series of discontinuous "quanta" or amounts.

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