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-- Large Hadron Collider ready to fire up...
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Excellent find Margs, love it!! 
EDIT: Even better than excellent, watch it!
Hardon is more like it. This kind of big-dickery on the frontiers of nuclear physics is expensive, and the concrete benefits are unknown at this point.
I'm all for the expansion of human knowledge, and I hope they find out the reason that matter has mass.
Will America make a bigger one? How long before there's a ring around the earth to accelerate protons?
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| Originally posted by Wurm Hardon is more like it. This kind of big-dickery on the frontiers of nuclear physics is expensive, and the concrete benefits are unknown at this point. I'm all for the expansion of human knowledge, and I hope they find out the reason that matter has mass. Will America make a bigger one? How long before there's a ring around the earth to accelerate protons? |
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| Originally posted by English Rachel And what about the dickery of defense? Waay more expensive than this and all that does is kill people! Give me the LHC anyday. |
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| Originally posted by infinity HiGH But we need to be able to defend ourselves from the evil terrorists and rogue states!! LOL I agree with ya |
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| Originally posted by English Rachel We may potentially need to defend ourselves from the proton people that the black hole releases.... aaararrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh |
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| Originally posted by infinity HiGH What if the proton people just turn out to be us but from another dimension? I guess everything would be back to normal? Humanity killing itself off. |
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| Originally posted by Cosmic Fur Gordon Freeman is on standby. |
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| Originally posted by English Rachel Excellent find Margs, love it!! EDIT: Even better than excellent, watch it! |
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| Originally posted by Engine9 |
LOL
*installs Half Life*
LOL at the Half Life reference.
so we're still alive and kicking 
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| Originally posted by FunkyCrew so we're still alive and kicking |
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| Originally posted by zokissima All they could have done at this point is power differing components of the machine to test for proper functionality. The kinds of experiments the machine was built for probably won't be performed for some time yet. |
Great article from Wired (as usual).
LHC FAQ in 140 Characters or Less
Particle physics is complicated. Tweets are not. So, naturally, answering your questions about the Large Hadron Collider in Twitter format, i.e. 140 characters or less, could help you understand some physics.
Q: WTF is a Large Hadron Collider?
A: Hadrons are the parent family for protons and neutrons. The collider will smash protons together to see what they're made of.
Q: What are ATLAS and CMS and all these other acronyms?
A: They are particle detectors. ATLAS and CMS are the big ones. Each detector is designed to carry out a set of experiments.
Q: How does the Large Hadron Collider work?
A: It smashes particles moving at near the speed of light together. Then, detectors look for very rare particles in the wreckage.
Q: Is smashing things together to look for progressively smaller and rarer particles really how particle physics is done?
A: More or less: yes. Theoretical physicists work out the math. The experiments get run to see whose math matches the world.
Q: Gimme the stats on the Collider? Factoid stats.
A: 17 miles around. 9,000 magnets. 7,000 scientists. $10 billion. Operating temp: -456.25 F. Power used: 120 MW. Network: 1.8+Gb/s.
Q: Who paid for the Large Hadron Collider?
A: You did! But not nearly as much as your European cousins. The US contribution stands at $531 million. Total cost: $10 billion.
Q: How does a particle detector work?
A: They work like digital cameras with 150 megapixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second! Then algorithms look for interesting stuff.
Q: Is there an end 'product/goal' that the average Joe will eventually see from these experiments? ie:teleportation?
A: Not directly, but confirmation that physicists understand the universe would be nice. And you never know. The engineering can lead to other things.
Q: When you smash particles at nearly the speed of light isn't that going to release a lot of energy?
A: Yes. The highest-energy collisions will reach 14 trillion electron volts.
Q: How many particles are actually colliding?
A: Hacked Wikipedia: The beam pipes contain 1.0�10-9 grams of hydrogen, which
would fill the volume of one grain of fine sand.
Q: Is the Large Hadron Collider a threat to human civilization and the existence of the Earth?
A: No. Einstein's relativity says it's impossible. And, just in case, studies of highly-energetic cosmic rays hitting earth rule it out, too.
The Big Bang Theory
Best Case: The Large Hadron Colliders' ALICE experiment successfully creates quark-gluon plasma, a substance theorized to have existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. By generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun, scientists hope to watch as this particle goo cools and expands into the particles that we know. That could help scientists answer why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they're made of.
Worst Case: Scientists inadvertently make a micro black hole, and the earth is quickly erased from existence. Just kidding: scientists at CERN and elsewhere have ruled out the possibility that the LHC will create any kind of doomsday scenario. The black holes that the LHC could theoretically create don't even have enough energy to light up a light bulb. On the other hand, the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal put the odds of destroying the world at 1 in 50 million (which puts it in the realm of possibilities but still not as likely as hitting the lottery).
String Theory
Best Case: Scientists detect certain types of supersymmetric particles, aka sparticles, which physicist Michio Kaku calls, "signals from the 11th dimension." This would show that string theorists have been on the right path and that the universe really is made up of the four dimensions we experience and then seven others that unite the forces of nature.
Worst Case: String theory's basic assumptions are violated. The LHC will be the first particle accelerator capable of allowing scientists to study W bosons, the elementary particle responsible for the weak force. If they don't scatter in certain ways, it'll be back to the drawing board for a generation of string theorists, or as one physicist told New Scientist, "If we see these violations, people will start working very feverishly on some sort of alternative that will produce these violations."
The "Our Universe Is Not Alone" Theory
Best Case: If scientists find a long-lived gluino, the postulated supersymmetric partner of the gluon, one group of scientists argues that it can be seen as a "messenger from the multiverse" and will lend support to the theory that our universe is just one of many. (Keep in mind though: not everyone is buying this interpretation.)
Worst Case: Our universe really is alone. Or even worse: it's lonely.
The Dark Matter of the Universe Theory
Best Case: Astrophysicists currently believe that 96 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and energy that we can't see and can barely detect. Dark matter alone is estimated to compose 26 percent of the universe, only we have no idea what it's made of. It has been postulated that the neutralino is the best candidate for dark matter. Many physicists hope that the neutralino -- which, if it exists, will be relatively easy to produce -- will make an appearance in the debris inside the CMS or Atlas detectors, confirming the theory of dark matter.
Worst Case: Proudly, physicists announce that they've observed dark matter's unmistakable signature inside one of the LHC's detectors. But over the next few weeks, the reality sinks in that they've actually made a measurement mistake. Some physicists don't think that the LHC will be precise enough to measure any dark matter that it's lucky enough to create.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics
Best Case: With the standard model so well elucidated, perhaps a curveball is in order. Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance notes, "There is almost a guarantee that the Higgs exists, or at least some sort of Higgs-like particle," so perhaps the best scenario would be finding the Higgs-like particle rather than the Higgs itself. That wouldn't be such a radical break from the model such that all previous work is too highly devalued, and at the same time it could open new physics frontiers.
Worst Case: The Higgs boson -- the long-postulated particle that is supposed to give mass to particles -- is finally confirmed. Sure, discovering the Higgs at the LHC would be neat, but it would basically just confirm a lot of what physicists already know, without really pushing the science: Boring. Some scientists have even said that their worst case scenario for the entire collider project would be finding the Higgs and just the Higgs.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/...osons-that.html
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| Originally posted by FunkyCrew poop I got excited for no reason |
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| Originally posted by StereoPrincess |
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| Originally posted by StereoPrincess |
Bad news today at the Large Hadron Collider, that big-bang tester everyone's been nervously joking about all week: Some badasses who call themselves the Greek Security Team hacked computers at the facility. In fact, they got in so deep, say reports, that they were "one step away" from cracking into the computer control system of one of the LHC's "detectors." Sounds scary, but it seems that, for scientists, it was more irksome than apocalyptic.
The so-called GST posted a menacing message at cmsmon.cern.ch, the website of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment team, which apparently closed with: "We are 2600 - dont mess with us." (Clearly, they didn't let proper punctuation get in the way of their dastardly schemes.) Eventually they were fended off. CERN spokesman James Gillies said, "There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable."
But even if they had broken through to the next network, it isn't clear whether they could've commenced Operation: Space-Time Rift. Says the UK Telegraph:
If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."
Particle collisions are now scheduled to occur about two months from now:
On 19 September a quench occurred in about 100 bending magnets in sectors 3-4, causing loss of approximately one ton of liquid Helium, which was vented into the tunnel. Vacuum was also lost in the affected magnets, whose temperature was raised by about 100 kelvins. The cause of the fault is being investigated over the weekend. It has since been reported that the incident will likely result in a delay of at least two months before any particle collisions can occur, most of the delay being due to the time needed to warm up the affected sectors and then cool them back down to operating temperature.
The first "modest" high-energy collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 900 GeV were expected to take place at the beginning of the week starting on 22 September 2008, but will now be delayed until around late November 2008, due to the quench mentioned above. Hence it is now unlikely that the LHC will be operating at 10 TeV by the time of the official inauguration on 21 October 2008, as initially predicted. The winter shut-down (starting likely around end of November) will then be used to train the superconducting magnets, such that the 2009 run will start at the full 14 TeV design energy.
LHC @ wiki
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