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I have to admit, it would be pretty ironic if we managed to end existence as we know it as a result of a science experiment trying to determine the origins of existence. I could just imagine a page for the human race in some super-evolved alien version of the Darwin Awards.
hahahahhaha
cenik
Amazing.
samhouse
a species "lifetime achievement award"!
"unfortunately, no member of the human race can be here in person to pick up this award so heres master yoda to accept for them"
zoogla
quote:
CERN Council looks forward to LHC start-up
Geneva, 20 June 2008. At its 147th meeting in Geneva today, the CERN1 Council heard news on progress towards start-up of the laboratory’s flagship research facility, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Commissioning of the 27-kilometre LHC began in January 2007 when the first cool down of one of the machine’s eight sectors began. Today, five sectors are at or close to their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero and the remaining three are approaching that temperature. Once all sectors are cold, electrical testing will be concluded in readiness for first beams, currently scheduled for August.
“The accelerator, detectors and computing are all on course,” said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, “and we are looking forward to the earliest possible LHC start-up.”
When the LHC starts up this summer, its proton beams will collide at higher energies than have ever been produced in a particle accelerator. The collision energy of the LHC, however, is modest compared to the energies of the cosmic ray protons that have been striking the Earth’s atmosphere for billions of years.
“The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator on Earth,” said Dr Aymar, “but the Universe has far more powerful ones. The LHC will enable us to study in detail under laboratory conditions what nature is doing already.”
The LHC is subject to numerous audits covering all aspects of safety and environmental impact. The latest of these, addressing the question of whether there is any danger related to the production of new particles at the LHC, was presented to Council at this meeting. Updating a 2003 paper, this new report incorporates recent experimental and observational data. It confirms and strengthens the conclusion of the 2003 report that there is no cause for concern. The report was prepared by a group of scientists at CERN, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“With this report, the Laboratory has fulfilled every safety and environmental evaluation necessary to ensure safe operation of this exciting new research facility,” said Dr Aymar.
The new report has been reviewed by the Scientific Policy Committee (SPC), a body that advises the CERN Council on scientific matters. A panel of five independent scientists, including one Nobel Laureate, reviewed and endorsed the authors’ approach of basing their arguments on irrefutable observational evidence to conclude that new particles produced at the LHC will pose no danger. The panel presented its conclusions to this week’s meeting of the full 20 members of the SPC, who unanimously approved this conclusion.
“It was right for the Director General of CERN to commission a formal assessment of safety issues, examining even the most unlikely of scenarios,” said Council President Torsten Åkesson. “This new report concludes that there is no basis for any concern, a position endorsed by the 20 independent experts who form the SPC.”
The new report is accompanied by a summary in non-technical language. All documents relating to the safety and environmental impact of the LHC are available through the CERN web site.
The 15-petabyte network and the atom smasher
By Nick Heath
Published: July 15, 2008 1:30 PM PDT
Enough information to fill multiple CDs every second is flowing across the world on a network 1,000 times faster than home broadband.
Terabytes of data are streaming through dedicated fiber-optic links between laboratories and universities globally in preparation for the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, being switched on in August at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG), a super-high-bandwidth network, will channel about 15 petabytes--15 million gigabytes--of data from the LHC to about 5,000 scientists in 500 institutions every year for at least 10 years.
The particle accelerator will smash subatomic particles, protons, into each other at 99 percent of the speed of light, spraying huge amounts of energy and particles into its detectors.
The LCG will allow researchers to tap into the distributed processing power of almost 100,000 CPUs, crunching through vast amounts of data from the detectors and speeding their hunt for clues about the fundamental nature of the universe.
Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, near Oxford, England, has a 10-gigabit connection to CERN capable of 1,250 megabits per second upstream and downstream that will pipe in almost-raw data from the collider via the U.K. part of the LCG--the GridPP.
Andrew Sansum, tier one manager at RAL, said its connection with CERN is about 1,000 times faster than the download speeds on a home broadband connection.
It may be less than two decades before commercial networks catch up: "Video and other media services are going to push the speed of consumer network connections up as the demand is going to be huge," Sansum said. "We were at today's speed of about 10Mbps about 10 to 15 years ago, so you could take that as a precedent for how long it will take for the commercial networks to catch up with us today."
RAL and other "tier one" sites across the world in the LCG will shape the mass of data from the LHC into chunks that can be usefully analyzed by physicists and pass it on to hundreds of "tier two" universities and laboratories in their respective countries.
"The LHC experiment would not be possible without the power and throughput of the LCG. CERN has not got the capacity to solely process the vast amount of data on site. The tier one sites will be busy refining the data and enhancing the software that analyses it, growing the processing operations of the grid," Sansum said.
"Our role," he said, "is to make sure that those physicists are getting the most useful and relevant data. Grid technology is transforming the way that experiments are being carried out. Ten years ago these institutions were working on their own; now they work closely together."
Sansum said RAL and the GridPP are prepared for the LHC going live. "We have run it up to 250Mbps to 300Mbps each way sustained over several days so far. We are in the final shakedown at the moment and seem to be in good shape to face the challenges the LHC will throw at us," he said.
There are bound to be surprises around the corner, he acknowledged. "The biggest challenge is for the software to work out which of the 200 or so tier two sites has which data. You need to be able to move vast amounts of data from site to site, check it has all got there, flag up any problems and correct those immediately--it quickly gets immensely complicated," Sansum said.
A wide range of projects are already tapping into the vast number-crunching capabilities and fat pipes of the GridPP during its downtime, including those searching for antimalarial drugs, combating avian flu, or using an image search engine.
There are various grid projects around the world analyzing weather data, collaborating on other scientific and academic projects, but none match the scale and sustained throughput of the LCG.
Grid technology will continue to grow in use, according to Sansum, linking up diverse data, such as climate information and localized cancer rates, and offering insight and driving scientific progress forward in ways never before possible.
*~LiSa-LoO~*
My dad told me about the project in the first post quite a few months back. He had read about it in a magazine that he got from the University of Toronto that's given to alumni. Sounds absolutely amazing. Very exciting.
My question....what if it doesn't prove the Big Bang Theory. Then what?
Dr. DAS
quote:
Originally posted by *~LiSa-LoO~*
My dad told me about the project in the first post quite a few months back. He had read about it in a magazine that he got from the University of Toronto that's given to alumni. Sounds absolutely amazing. Very exciting.
My question....what if it doesn't prove the Big Bang Theory. Then what?
Aim the proton stream at pigeons.
Chris Allen
quote:
Originally posted by *~LiSa-LoO~*
My question....what if it doesn't prove the Big Bang Theory. Then what?
Use it to make ultra-lava-hot, hot pockets.
soupastah
Prometheus Xex
Nice video... so uplifting!
Vivid Boy
quote:
Originally posted by soupastah
for that split second, craziest blowjob ever!
Jem_hadar
quote:
Originally posted by dj_souvlaki
so than if this proves that the big bang happened.
that would mean religion is fake.
The big bang IS proved to have been an event that occurred already.
There is all kinds of evidence to suggest its occurrence in the distant past.
