Haaretz,  September 11 - Seven years later, By Tom Segev - Seven years ago today, it looked as though the world would never again be what it was before the attack on the World Trade Center. At the south end of Manhattan I, too, had trouble breathing, and the choking dust carried with it a yellowish, nauseating threat...

On the first anniversary, everyone tried to define the historical significance of the 9/11 attacks, and to formulate profound insights about the social changes they had brought about. It was a pretentious and foolish attempt.

Everyone also spoke about the patriotism that had swept America, a clear expression of insecurity and a conservative attempt to hold on to the values of the past. …

Many assumed at the time that mayor Rudy Giuliani would be the next president of the United States, and had that really happened, it would have been possible to say the attack on the Twin Towers really did make history. The real story is that the shock of the attack didn't last long, and the glory of the leader-savior enjoyed by Giuliani evaporated quite quickly.

"September 11th," as people now say in almost every language, also offered a good opening for a historical discussion on the decline of America. The U.S. has lost its status as the sole superpower, and the recent economic crisis has brought about a situation whereby most Americans do not believe today that their children will live a better life than they have. This is ostensibly the most profound expression of the loss of personal security that everyone attributed to the attack; after all, the need to remove one's shoes during the security check before boarding a plane has not really changed the American dream.

Nor is America sinking, of course. As opposed to the muscular atrophy that it broadcasts occasionally, during the past year, it has demonstrated social vitality and an amazing ability for renewal, with almost half of the American public apparently having decided that for the first time they are ready for a black president. The conservative patriotism that seized them seven years ago and that often includes racist elements, did not destroy their ability to advance toward their national dream. …

Seven years after that day in September, the attack is too distant for tears, too near for understanding. Therefore, it may be no coincidence that the American media are returning this week to the survivors of the attack and the bereaved, asking them what they feel and what has happened to them since then, as though it were their private disaster. We can learn from that - it's easier to enter the culture of memory than the history books.

TO SEARCH OR NOT TO SEARCH ?

Spiegel, September 9 - Large Hadron Collider - The Controversial Search for the God Particle - Will the Large Hadron Collider, set to be fired up on Wednesday, bring about the end of the world? Most physicists say no -- but they are hoping for clues as to how the universe began.

Talk about a public relations problem. Imagine spending years sinking vast quantities of money, time and ambition into an intricately complex project only to face accusations just before the project's debut that you might accidentally bring about the end of the world.

This, essentially, is the PR issue facing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as scientists on Wednesday plan to send the first beam of protons around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) long loop buried deep below ground not far from Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists say that the €6.4 billion ($9.2 billion) project -- the lion's share of which came from European countries -- may provide unique new insights into how our universe was formed, the existence of "dark matter" and even the possible reality of a number of new dimensions.

Critics, though, many of whom have found a powerful platform on the Internet, fear that by smashing protons against each other at 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, scientists could create tiny black holes which could eventually grow to the point that they swallow up the Earth.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research -- known by its French acronym CERN -- has spent considerable energy discounting such fears. An international team of scientists published yet another assessment of the particle accelerator's safety over the weekend in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics -- to go with a number of other safety evaluations conducted by the project.
"The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction," said Robert Aymar, who heads CERN.

Still, the project has been swamped by e-mails from those concerned that scientists may be biting off more than they can chew. Videos on YouTube show what it might look like were a black hole, starting below the ground outside of Geneva, to swallow up the Earth. Skeptics in the United States filed suit in a US District Court in Hawaii in an attempt to block the project. A similar effort was mounted by a German scientist who brought suit at the European Court of Human Rights -- though the case was tossed out at the very end of August.

One Nobel prize-winning physicist associated with the project, Frank Wilczek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has even received death threats connected with the start of the LHC. "I have received threats by both e-mail and by telephone," Wilczek told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "I'm trying not to let it bother me -- with some success."

Even if scientists say they are confident that switching on the LHC won't bring the world to a sudden end, some of them are hoping to find evidence of dimensions in excess of the four we are currently aware of. Because the LHC is the most powerful and most precise particle accelerator ever built, many see it as the best opportunity yet to find proof for the veracity of "string theory."

String theory is a mathematical construct that many believe might explain away inconsistencies between Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics -- a major focus in theoretical physics for much of the last century. The highly complex models used in string theory point to the possible existence of up to 11 dimensions and also make predictions about the existence of some as-yet unobserved sub-atomic particles. Should the LHC be able to find some of those particles, a much touted theory of physics would have its first kernel of proof.

But string theory is just one idea being investigated by the thousands of scientists from more than 80 countries who will be running, analyzing and evaluating the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Many also hope to find the elusive "Higgs boson," a theoretical particle named after the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs. He came up with a theory in 1964 to help explain what gives mass to matter, thus making the universe possible. Higgs pointed to a particle that has so far never been observed. By creating conditions similar to those that existed at the birth of our universe, the so-called "Big Bang," scientists hope to be able to find Higgs boson, also known as the "God Particle."

Others will be looking for all manner of sub-atomic particles and anti-particles, the origins of dark energy and the make-up of dark matter.

Almost just as interesting, though, is the massive computer network CERN has set up to evaluate the prodigious quantities of data the LHC will produce. Called the LHC Grid, the network will encompass some 60,000 computers around the world in order to leverage enough computer power to go through the 15 petabytes of information LHC experiments will produce each year.

"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," Ian Bird, who heads up the LHC Grid project, told the Associated Press. Within those billions of pixels -- collected by a multitude of ultra-sensitive sensors within the tunnel -- might be a few that show minimal evidence of a new sub-atomic particle.

Still, despite all the hype and the hope, scientists truly don't know exactly what they'll find in this grandest of all scientific experiments. "What I would like to see is the unexpected," Gerardus t'Hooft, a physicist at the University of Michigan, told Reuters. Perhaps, he says, the LHC "will show us things we didn't know existed."

But for those expecting the end of the world, the wait will continue for another few weeks. The Large Hadron Collider won't actually begin bashing protons against each other until later this autumn.

Haaretz, September 10 - Israeli scientists join experiment to break open 'Big Bang' - It is afternoon in the control room of the Atlas particle detector, the biggest and most complex system of its kind. Prof. Giora Minkenberg of the Weizmann Institute is examining the tracks of a few muons 100 deep meters in the ground, which were picked up by the apparatus. Minkenberg points out the path of the muons, elementary particles that bear a negative charge, a heavy version of an electron.

"These are plain muons," he explains. "They are from the cosmic radiation reaching the earth. They were picked up in our experiment just by chance."

But if scientists identify a Higgs Boson (or "God particle") by the muons it breaks up into, this will be the key to proving, or disproving, the standard theory guiding nuclear physics.

International physicists at the vast underground complex near Geneva inaugurated a 20-year project on Wednesday that will try to reenact the Big Bang, in an attempt to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbor life.

In a giant machine called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the CERN research center straddling the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva, scientists plan to smash particles together to create a small-scale reenactment of the event that kicked off the cosmos.

The LHC will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km tunnel where they will collide at close to the speed of light. Computers will record what happens each time, and the vast store of material gathered will be analyzed by some 10,000 scientists around the globe for clues on what came next.

Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will pursue concepts such as "dark matter," "dark energy," extra dimensions and, most of all, the Higgs Boson "God particle" believed to have made it all possible.

"The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the universe," said CERN's French Director-General Robert Aymar. "Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind's understanding of our world's origins will be greatly enriched."

Minkenberg, 61, divides his time between CERN and Weizmann. He has been conducting experiments with CERN for over 20 years. Now he spends his time running from building to building in last-minute preparations for the launch, and smokes his pipe between the meetings. He is the head of the Israeli team, consisting of over 50 scientists, including students. Other members of the Israeli team include Prof. Ehud Duchovni and Prof. Eilam Gross from Weizmann, along with others from Tel Aviv University and the Technion.

CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the entire planet.

Cosmologists say the Big Bang occurred some 15 billion years ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in what was then a void, spewed out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.

But the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) CERN project, begins with a relatively simple procedure: pumping a particle beam around the underground tunnel.

Technicians will first attempt to push the beam in one direction round the tightly-sealed collider, some 100 meters underground. Once they have done that - and CERN officials say there is no guarantee they will be successful in the initial stages - they will project a beam in the other direction.

And then, perhaps in the coming weeks, they will pump beams in both directions and smash the particles together, initially at low intensity. At the end of the year, they will move on to produce tiny collisions that will recreate the heat and energy of the Big Bang, the reigning theory on the origin of the universe.

The detectors will monitor the billions of particles that will emerge from the collisions, capturing on computer the way they come together, fly apart or just simply dissolve.

It is in these conditions that scientists hope to fairly quickly find the Higgs Boson, named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964 as the answer to the mystery of how matter gains mass.

Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never have taken shape in the aeons after the Big Bang, and life could never have begun - on Earth or, if it exists as many scientists believe, on other planets.

But the experiment is not without detractors. Certain Web sites on the Internet, which CERN created 20 years ago as a means of passing particle research results to scientists around the globe, have been promoted claims that the LHC will create black holes that will suck in the planet. "Nonsense," say the CERN and leading international scientists.

"The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction," said Aymar.

Herald Tribune, September 10 - Physicists run first particles through CERN collider, by Dennis Overbye - Batavia, Illinois: Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of Champagne into the future Wednesday.

After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.

At 10:27 a.m. in Geneva, scientists sent the beam of protons around the collider's racetrack, which is 17 miles, or 27 kilometers, long and runs deep beneath the Swiss-French border, and then sent another beam through again.

"It's a fantastic moment," said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception. "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe."

Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.

An ocean away from Geneva, the collider's activation was watched with bittersweet excitement here in Batavia at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which until that moment had the reigning particle collider.

Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers gathered to watch the dawn of a new generation in high-energy physics, applauding each milestone of the night as the beam was slowly wrestled into shape at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Many of them, including the lab's director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even nightcaps bearing Fermilab patches on them.

Oddone lauded the new machine as the result of "two and a half decades of dreams to open up this
huge new territory in the exploration of the natural world."

Roger Aymar, CERN's director, called the new collider a "discovery machine." The buzz was worldwide. Gordon Kane, of the University of Michigan called the collider "a why machine," in a posting on the blog "Cosmic Variance."

Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, have called it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.

But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz and excitement about particle physics. "Bad publicity is still publicity," he said. "This is something that people can talk to their neighbors about."

The only thing physicists agree on is that they don't know what will happen when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.

"That there are many theories means we don't have a clue," Oddone said. "That's what makes it so exciting."

Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.

But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did Wednesday was turn on an engine that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first real collisions, at an energy of five trillion electron volts, will happen later this autumn.

Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on the experts and nonexperts gathered in Batavia.

At 2 a.m. local time, Herman White, a physicist here, and master of ceremonies for the night, took the stage to announce the night's schedule. For at least the next few hours, he said, "we are still the highest-energy accelerator in the world," to wild applause.
In an interview earlier that day, Oddone called it a "bittersweet moment."

Once upon a time, the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab's Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, anti-protons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts, was the world's largest particle machine.

By the end of the year, when the CERN collider has revved up to five trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time toward the Big Bang.

In 1993, the U.S. Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. That collider, its former director Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas in Austin said recently, would have been in operation around 2001.

Schwitters said that U.S. particle physics - the search for the most fundamental rules and constituents of nature - had never really recovered from the loss of the supercollider. "One nonrenewable resource is a person's time and good years," he said, adding that many young people had left the field for astrophysics or cosmology.

Oddone, Fermilab's director, said the uncertainties of steady congressional funding made the situation at Fermilab and physics in general in the United States "suspenseful."

CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countries, whose budget is determined by treaty and thus stable. The year after the supercollider was killed, CERN decided to go ahead with its own collider.

Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531 million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Oddone said that Americans constitute about a quarter of the scientists who have built the four giant detectors that sit at points around the racetrack to collect and analyze the debris from the primordial fireballs.

In fact, a remote-control room for monitoring one of those experiments, known poetically as the Compact Muon Solenoid, was built at Fermilab, just off the lobby of the main building here.

"The mood is great at this place," he said, noting that the Tevatron was humming productively and accumulating data at a much more rapid pace than the CERN collider would initially produce. There is even still a chance that Tevatron could find the sacred Higgs boson before the new hadron collider, which is bound to have a slow start.

Another target of physicists is a principle called supersymmetry, which predicts, among other things, that there is a vast population of new particle species left over from the Big Bang and waiting to be discovered, one of which could be the long-sought dark matter.

"It would be a very rich life if supersymmetry is found," Oddone said. "It would amount to permanent employment for physicists for decades.
"The truly surprising thing is if we don't see anything."

By the time festivities started, at 2 a.m. Chicago time, outside and inside the control room for the solenoid detector, Fermilab had been festooned with balloons and the accelerator was already half an hour late. The superconducting magnets that guide the protons around on their path have to be cooled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin, about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero, and one of the eight sectors of the underground ring was too warm, so scientists had to wait to cool it back down.

Then Evans, the collider project director, outlined the plan for the evening: sending a bunch of protons clockwise farther and farther around the collider until they made it all the way. He confessed to not knowing how long it would take, noting that for a previous CERN accelerator it had taken 12 hours. "I hope this will go much faster," he said.

Twenty minutes later, when the displays in the control room showed that the beam had made it to its first stopping point, the crowd applauded.

Twenty minutes after that, the physicists erupted in cheers when their consoles showed that the muon solenoid had detected collisions between the beam and stray gas molecules in the otherwise vacuum beam pipe. Their detector was alive and working.

Finally, at 3:27 Chicago time, the display showed that the protons had made it all the way around to another big detector named Atlas, whose members quickly confirmed that their experiment had also seen collisions.

At Fermilab, they broke out the Champagne. Oddone congratulated his European colleagues.
"We have all worked together and brought this machine to life," he said. "We're so excited about sending a beam around. Wait until we start having collisions and doing physics."
        
CULTURE

September  11 - Israel Diamond Museum displays ancient jewelry - New exhibition of rare and ancient jewelry excavated in archeological sites throughout Israel - "Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver" - pays tribute to Israel's rich tradition of jewelry design.
 
The Harry Oppenheimer Israel Diamond Museum, located within the Israeli Diamond Industry complex, will open an exhibition of rare and ancient jewelry excavated in archeological sites throughout Israel on September 12, 2008.

The exhibition reveals gold jewelry that has never before been seen, much of which dates from Biblical times and even earlier. The jewels, some of which are set with precious stones, enable a rare glimpse into the lifestyle and culture of the ancient Israelites, and attest to the Land of Israel's unique position as a cultural and commercial crossroad of the ancient world. All of the items have been lent to the Diamond Museum courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The exhibition also reveals a great deal about the creation of ancient jewelry - the methods, the craftsmen, the influences of other ancient civilizations and the role jewelry played in the religion and culture of the times. Over 100 pieces from the huge collections of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Hecht Museum were individually chosen by curator Yehuda Kassif to shed light on this subject.

Many of the pieces on display seem to have been created today - and might appear in the collections of  leading contemporary jewelry designers. However, the exhibition brings us back to the days of the Bible, when golden balls used in intricate jewelry designs were known as "apples". The exhibition takes its name from the Book of Proverbs, chapter 25, verse 11: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."

Eli Avidar, Managing Director of the Israel Diamond Institute Group of Companies as well as the Israel Diamond Museum, said "This exhibition is The Israeli Diamond Industry's tribute to the ancient jewelry tradition of the Land of Israel. It is a fitting way to connect our past and present, especially during Israel's 60th anniversary." He added that the Israeli Diamond Industry is poised to expand its activity into jewelry manufacturing, with many Israeli diamantaires now designing and producing their own lines of diamond jewelry. "Our ancient roots include a rich jewelry-making tradition. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to explore this tradition, which forms the basis for our contemporary jewelry creations. I invite jewelry designers to visit and to take inspiration from these timeless pieces," he said.

The Harry Oppenheimer Israel Diamond Museum was reopened this year after undergoing a major renovation, making it the most modern diamond museum in the world. In addition to a permanent display that utilizes the most modern technologies to showcase the fascinating journey of the diamond from the depths of the earth to the finished jewel, the museum holds changing exhibitions featuring jewelry from around the world. This is the first exhibition of ancient jewelry to be held in the diamond complex.
 
Shmuel Schnitzer, Chairman of the Israel Diamond Museum, said: "This exhibition, with its journey through the corridors of time, is another jewel in the crown of the renovated museum that serves as the showcase of the international world of diamonds - a world in which the Israeli industry plays such a central role."