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-- Coolest. Thing. Ever.
Coolest. Thing. Ever.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6402493.stm
Milestone for giant physics lab
YB0 segment of CMS positioned over its shaft Image: CMS
YB0 is the biggest and most impressive element of the CMS
Construction on a giant underground laboratory that will help take physics into a new era reaches a major milestone on Wednesday.
From 0500 GMT, a crane will lower 2,000 tonnes of machinery into a man-made cavern 100m below ground.
The machinery is part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of four big experiments belonging to the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
This accelerator is being built at Cern, on the Franco-Swiss border.
It will be spectacular
Jim Virdee
CMS team spokesman
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to probe the limits of physics.
It is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash particles together at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.
This particle accelerator comprises over 1,000 powerful magnets occupying a subterranean tunnel that runs in a ring for 27km.
The magnets carry two beams of particles around the ring at speeds close to the speed of light.
Critical parts
At certain points along this ring, the beams cross over, causing some of the particles to collide head-on.
Each of the four huge LHC experiments, including the CMS, sits near one of these crossing points.
These experiments, or detectors, will capture and measure new particles produced in the collisions.
These could point to new phenomena beyond the so-called standard model of physics - a framework to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles.
The CMS is being lowered into its underground cavern piece by piece
Enlarge Image
The 2,000-tonne piece that will be winched down the 100m shaft at Cern on Wednesday is the largest and most impressive segment of the CMS.
It is called the Yoke Barrel 0, or YB0 for short, and forms the central "barrel wheel" segment of the CMS experiment. It is flanked on either side by two smaller wheels.
The YB0 element will house most of the critical inner parts of the experiment and is about 16m tall, 17m wide and 13m long.
"It is the largest of 15 pieces due to go down," said Jim Virdee, chief spokesman for the CMS science team.
"It will be spectacular. We were drawing all these things 15 years ago on a piece of paper. So to see them being assembled is exciting and partly emotional."
'God' particle
If all goes well, the YB0 element should be fully lowered into its cavern by 1700 to 1800 GMT on Wednesday.
So far, eight of the 15 key elements that make up the CMS have been successfully lowered. YB0 will be the ninth.
The experiment will then have to be assembled into its final configuration inside the cavern.
In its final form, the Compact Muon Solenoid will be cylindrical, 21m long and 16m in diameter and weigh approximately 12,500 tonnes.
The CMS is one of two general purpose experiments at the LHC.
It will aim to identify the elusive Higgs boson (known as the "God particle" because of its importance to the Standard Model of physics), look for so-called supersymmetric particles and seek out the existence of extra dimensions.
Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by Dopey the existence of extra dimensions. |
These assholes are going to make a blackhole that will kill us all..
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| Originally posted by Capitalizt These assholes are going to make a blackhole that will kill us all.. |
Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN this is the cool bit! coz i think the big bang needed extra dimensions in order to be likely.. very cool. i bet theres another dimension where shaolin_z doesnt wear a silverhat 24/7 |
Sweet, I'm going to live in another dimension, brb.
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| Originally posted by Marc Summers Sweet, I'm going to live in another dimension, brb. |
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| Originally posted by DJ Shibby haha, don't forget to send a postcard |
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| Originally posted by Marc Summers Wait, would earth be in other dimensions? |
There's a doom's day scenario associated with high energy particle physics experiments. They seem to be working towards it 
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| Originally posted by Capitalizt These assholes are going to make a blackhole that will kill us all.. |
Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN this is the cool bit! coz i think the big bang needed extra dimensions in order to be likely.. very cool. i bet theres another dimension where shaolin_z doesnt wear a silverhat 24/7 |
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Re: Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by DJ Shibby All a dimension really entails is a measurement of reality... |
all i gathered are that these big machines could catch certain things (things is the technical term obviously) jumping into alternate universes.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN not sure im explaining very well, |
Re: Re: Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN if youre being scientific, explain what you mean. if youre being philosophical then im not interested. the doco i saw, stated that certain aspects of the galaxy, such as incredibly precise aspect of gravity, are incredibly unlikely to just come into being. it required a multiverse where such values would exist in an infinite number of universes, most of which whom would not possess such necessary mathematics. sure im explaining very well, and i know i dont understand it properly all i gathered are that these big machines could catch certain things (things is the technical term obviously) jumping into alternate universes. |
Can't they wait a couple of centuries and do these experiments on the moon or elsewhere in the universe? You know, just in case something goes wrong
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| Originally posted by Omega_M There's a doom's day scenario associated with high energy particle physics experiments. They seem to be working towards it |
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Coolest. Thing. Ever.
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| Originally posted by Omega_M A dimension may simply refer to a variable quantity. It need not always be spatial in nature. So a 4-D space-time is a continuum with 3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time. A "phase plane" can have one dimension of displacement and another of velocity and so on. (not a precise definition). The colloquial and mathematical definitions of the same words are different. Space could simply be defined as a set of all possible numbers a particular variable may have. So unless you are talking about lofty theories in astrophysics, dimension is simply a mathematical representation of some quantity and when you talk of higher dimensions, it's not that exotic. |
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| Originally posted by Capitalizt These assholes are going to make a blackhole that will kill us all.. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Capitalizt These assholes are going to make a blackhole that will kill us all.. |
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| A black hole ate my planet Could physicists accidentally make killer black holes or lethal strange matter that would swallow the Earth? At least there'd be no one left to say sorry to, says Robert Matthews UH-OH, the mad scientists are at it again. In their determination to extract nature's secrets, physicists in America have built a machine so powerful it has raised fears that it might cause The End of The World As We Know It. "Big Bang machine could destroy Earth" ran the headline over a story in The Sunday Times last month. It claimed that our planet was in peril from a vast new American particle accelerator on Long Island, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which will collide pairs of gold nuclei at high energies. According to the article, RHIC could trigger a catastrophic event: the creation of a black hole or a ravenous "strangelet" that could swallow up our entire planet. Within 24 hours, the laboratory issued a rebuttal: the risk of such a catastrophe was essentially zero. The Brookhaven National Laboratory that runs the collider had set up an international committee of experts to check out this terrifying possibility. But BNL director John Marburger, insisted that the risks had already been worked out. He formed the committee simply to say why they are so confident the Earth is safe, and put their arguments on the Web to be read by a relieved public. Even so, many people will be stunned to learn that physicists felt worried enough even to mull over the possibility that a new machine might destroy us all. In fact, they've been fretting about it for over 50 years. The first physicist to get the collywobbles was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. In July 1942, he was one of a small group of theorists invited to a secret meeting at the University of California, Berkeley, to sketch out the design of a practical atomic bomb. Teller, who was studying the reactions that take place in a nuclear explosion, stunned his colleagues by suggesting that the colossal temperatures generated might ignite the Earth's atmosphere. While some of his colleagues immediately dismissed the threat as nonsense, J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, set up to build the atom bomb, took it seriously enough to demand a study. The report, codenamed LA-602, was made public only in February 1973. It concentrated on the only plausible reaction for destroying the Earth, fusion between nuclei of nitrogen-14. The report confirmed what the sceptics had insisted all along: the nuclear fireball cools down too far quickly to trigger a self-sustaining fire in the atmosphere. Yet in November 1975, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists claimed that Arthur Compton, a leading member of the Manhattan Project, had said that there really was a risk of igniting the atmosphere. It turned out to be a case of Chinese whispers: Compton had mentioned the calculation during an interview with the American writer Pearl Buck, who had got the wrong end of the stick. Even so, the Los Alamos study is a watershed in the history of science, for it marks the first time scientists took seriously the risk that they might accidentally blow us all up. The issue keeps raising its ugly head. In recent years the main focus of fear has been the giant machines used by particle physicists. Could the violent collisions inside such a machine create something nasty? "Every time a new machine has been built at CERN," says physicist Alvaro de Rujula, "the question has been posed and faced." One of the most nightmarish scenarios is destruction by black hole. Black holes are bottomless pits with an insatiable appetite for anything and everything. If a tiny black hole popped into existence in RHIC, the story goes, it would burrow down from Long Island to the centre of the Earth and eat our planet--or blow it apart with all the energy released. So why are physicists convinced that there's no chance of this happening? Well, the smallest possible black hole is around 10-35 metres across (the so-called Planck Length). Anything smaller just gets wiped out by the quantum fluctuations in space-time around it. But even such a tiny black hole would weigh around 10 micrograms--about the same as a speck of dust. To create objects with so much mass by collisions in a particle accelerator demands energies of 1019 giga-electronvolts, so the most powerful existing collider is ten million billion times too feeble to make a black hole. Scaling up today's technology, we would need an accelerator as big as the Galaxy to do it. And even then, the resulting black hole wouldn't be big enough to swallow the Earth. Such a tiny black hole would evaporate in 10-42 seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation, a process discovered by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. To last long enough even to begin sucking in matter rather than going off pop, a black hole would have to be many orders of magnitude bigger. According to Cliff Pickover, author of Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide, "Even a black hole with the mass of Mount Everest would have a radius of only about 10-15 metres, roughly the size of an atomic nucleus. Current thinking is that it would be hard for such a black hole to swallow anything at all--even consuming a proton or neutron would be difficult." So we needn't lose sleep about creating an Earth-eating black hole in an accelerator. But according to John Wheeler of Princeton University, there is another way: detonating a big hydrogen bomb. He showed that the pressures generated by a suitable explosion could crush matter to the densities needed (around 1017 kilograms per cubic metre) to stand a chance of creating a black hole. However, Wheeler estimated that a "suitable" H-bomb would require all the heavy water in the oceans, and weigh many billions of tonnes. Some bomb. The more discerning mad scientist might instead opt to pick a black hole "off the shelf". One left over from the Big Bang or an exploding star, for example. The temptation is certainly there, for as the Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose showed 30 years ago, black holes make wonderfully clean sources of energy. Just throw a skipful of junk at a black hole in the right way, Penrose discovered, and it will eat up all the junk and then hurl the empty skip back out again with more energy than it had before. Fortunately, there's not much chance of bringing a black hole to Earth any time soon. After all, they would be rather unwieldy and the nearest one is likely to be many light years away. It was while dismissing the black-hole threat in last month's Scientific American that theorist Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton mentioned an altogether more exotic form of killer blob: "strangelets". Strangelets are chunks of matter made from "strange" quarks as well as the usual "up" and "down" types of ordinary matter. It might be possible to make them in particle accelerators like RHIC. The risk is that a strangelet might consume nuclei of ordinary matter and convert them into more strange matter, transmuting the entire Earth into a strange-matter planet. But having raised this appalling prospect, Wilczek quickly dismissed it. And quite rightly, says the world's leading expert on strangelets, Robert Jaffe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Strangelets are almost certainly not stable, and if they are, they almost certainly cannot be produced at RHIC," he says. "And even if they were produced at RHIC, they almost certainly have positive charge and would be screened from further interactions by a surrounding cloud of electrons." Every one of these steps in the argument would have to be flawed for strangelets to be a risk. Blown to smithereens But don't heave a sigh of relief just yet. The Brookhaven scientists have also considered an even more alarming possibility than the destruction of the Earth. Could their mighty machine trigger the collapse of the quantum vacuum? Quantum theory predicts that the Universe is filled with a seething melee of so-called vacuum energy. That might seem an unlikely threat to civilisation. After all, it's simply the average energy of the mess of particles that flit in and out of existence all around us. As the Universe expanded and cooled, that vacuum energy dropped down to the lowest possible level. Or did it? What if the Universe is still "hung up" in an unstable state? Then a jolt of the right amount of energy in a small space might trigger the collapse of the quantum vacuum state. A wave of destruction would travel outwards at the speed of light, altering the Universe in bizarre ways. It would be rather bad news for us, at least: ordinary matter would cease to exist. In 1995, Paul Dixon, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii, picketed Fermilab in Illinois because he feared that its Tevatron collider might trigger a quantum vacuum collapse. Then again in 1998, on a late night talk radio show, he warned that the collider could "blow the Universe to smithereens". But particle physicists have this covered. In 1983, Martin Rees of Cambridge University and Piet Hut of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, pointed out that cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles such as protons) have been smashing into things in our cosmos for aeons. Many of these collisions release energies hundreds of millions of times higher than anything RHIC can muster--and yet no disastrous vacuum collapse has occurred. The Universe is still here. This argument also squashes any fears about black holes or strange matter. If it were possible for an accelerator to create such a doomsday object, a cosmic ray would have done so long ago. "We are very grateful for cosmic rays," says Jaffe. But RIHC is special, goes the counter-argument, because it collides gold nuclei together. What if some subtle unforeseen physical effect makes collisions between heavy nuclei particularly dangerous? Fortunately, there are some heavy nuclei among the multitude of cosmic rays that fly through the Solar System. "We believe there are relevant cosmic ray "experiments" for every known threat," says Jaffe. "Even if one insists on gold-gold collisions, there have been enough such collisions on the surface of the Moon since its formation 5 billion years ago to assure us that RHIC experiments are safe." So until we can build atom smashers so powerful that they can exceed the energy of the punchiest cosmic rays, we needn't lose any sleep over them. Paranoiacs should look elsewhere, and a good place to start would be in the pages of journals like Physical Review Letters, which have carried schemes for extracting energy from the quantum vacuum. The worry here is that no-one knows how much energy might be unleashed: calculations give answers anywhere between zero and infinity. Arthur C. Clarke once raised the possibility that some of those vast explosions we see in the cosmos may be smart-alec alien scientists getting their comeuppance for tinkering with the quantum vacuum: "they might be industrial accidents" he said. Those of a nervous disposition should stop reading now. For some top physicists are toying with the idea of recreating the birth of the Universe right here on Earth (see "Cosmos-making for amateurs"). One of the big names backing this idea is cosmologist Andrei Linde of Stanford University. He admits that he has no idea how to trigger a little big bang, yet insists that the experiment would not be catastrophic. But then, as the Russian theorist Lev Landau once said: "Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt." Perhaps Linde's reassurance will turn out to be the very last Famous Last Words. Robert Matthews is science correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph |
I wonder how this news will effect the Rapture Index?!
http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html
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| +1 on the Index 01 False Christs A gentleman in Florida has made news by claiming to be Christ. |
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| Originally posted by George Smiley I wonder how this news will effect the Rapture Index?! http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html |
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| Originally posted by tathi Half Life anyone? |
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