Large Hadron Collider

seek said:
I just hope they have a few emergency crowbars around the place...
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And somebody named Gordon Freeman to save us all.

aftershxck said:
Would you die if you stood in the middle when those miniscule particles are shot at each other at high speed? O_O
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mark1 said:
EDIT: From the magazine: 'When the LHC is at peak performance, 3000 beams each containing 100 billion protons will whizz around in each direction - storing energy equivalent to a 400-tonne train travelling at 150km/h (90mph). Such a beam could drill a hole through the magnets and put the machine out for months.'

It also says that if it detects a beam straying off course, they redirect it into a block of graphite shielded by 100 tonnes of concrete and steel to act as a 'bullet trap'.
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Nah, you should be OK if you stand in the middle :)
 
ONESHOTKILL said:
looks like the thing that was in the last terminator movie when she was stuck to the pipe
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Its just a smaller version of the LHC. What people seem to forget is that there are already smaller particle accelerators in use today - the LHC is just the largest/most powerful one to be built yet.
 
Ben M said:
I'd be more worried about the fact that it's a vacuum in there.
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And the fact that the tube is only about a foot or so across.

Ranek405 said:
Its just a smaller version of the LHC. What people seem to forget is that there are already smaller particle accelerators in use today - the LHC is just the largest/most powerful one to be built yet.
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Most powerful, but not largest. Its predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron Collider was what the LHC's tunnels were originally built for :)
 
In April 2005, a trial successfully streamed 600 MB per second to seven different sites across the world. If all the data generated by the LHC is to be analysed, then scientists must achieve 1,800 MB per second before 2008.

if that doesnt happen then theres no point as no info will be sent.
 
yes they are looking for gravitons as well as other questionable topics such as dark matter, they are particularly interested in gravitons because as you know they theoretically controll mass, detecting these gravitons gives them the ability to identify and then "play" with these atoms which could *possibly* mean changing the weight of objects. they are also looking for other things because we only know a small fraction of what atoms are held in space etc etc.
 
Ben M said:
[..]
What they're looking for is the Higg's boson, which was predicted to exist by the standard model of particle physics, but has not yet been observed. If they don't find it, there will be a lot of head scratching done by boffins, and probably another collider :p
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There is one planned already. It's bigger.

I've seen video from inside the LHC. It's awesome. It's not just the scale of the engineering, it's the scale of the audacity of the whole thing.
 
with my hangover eyes, i read 'collier'

i opened this thread expecting photo's of a new dog you've just bought (and a big one at that)

for me, the thread fails to deliver :(
 
MattandJet said:
whats the probability of this thing going wrong and killing us all ? :P
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No-one really knows. It's going to create circumstances that up until that point would have been purely theoretical. The theories, apparently, say that there isn't any risk at all. For example, if it creates miniature black holes, the theory indicates that isn't a problem because black holes that small quickly disappear. Shame about the total lack of experimental evidence. Gathering it is one of the points of the LHC.

Although I think that the black holes that the LHC creates (if it does) are so small in both size and mass that it doesn't matter if the theory is wrong and they don't evaporate. You could throw one right through your own head and it probably wouldn't hit anything. They'd go batting off into space, too, given the speeds involved.

Or strangelets. I've no idea what they are, but apparently some people think they might be created by the LHC.
 
I dont see how it would create a black hole as black holes are created from a large mass collapsing on itself. the objects in question are so tiny they can pass through us.

so unless size doesnt matter (mind the pun) a black hole formation couldnt occur :S but Im probably wrong :p
 
DannyDan said:
why on earth anyone would spend such money on a machine to collide invisible things is beyond me
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If people had always had that attitude towards modern science we'd still be in medieval times ;)

If time, effort and money hadn't been poured into researching quantum mechanics – something it must have been difficult to foresee applications for – early last century, for example, there'd be no such thing as the modern computer.
 
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DannyDan said:
why on earth anyone would spend such money on a machine to collide invisible things is beyond me
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just because you cant see it doesnt mean its not there, and everything we know of is based on atoms. being able to identify and manipulate these give infinite results. but we dont know what atoms are out there. so we need this to be able to identify them.
 
codec said:
I dont see how it would create a black hole as black holes are created from a large mass collapsing on itself. the objects in question are so tiny they can pass through us.

so unless size doesnt matter (mind the pun) a black hole formation couldnt occur :S but Im probably wrong :p
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If you bang stuff together hard enough, you can make a black hole. Or so they think. Essentially, you have to get it into a small enough space. It's the density that makes it a black hole, not the mass. The reason why it appears to only happen with the implosion of a large enough star is that's the only known thing violent enough to ram matter into a small enough space.

It's thought that soon after the creation of everything, conditions allowed miniature black holes to form. It's thought that the LHC will be able to duplicate those conditions, accelerating particles up to such a high speed that they will form a black hole when they collide. It's thought that Hawking radiation will evaporate a black hole away. If Hawking's theory is correct, the amount of time taken for a black hole to evaporate depends on its mass. For stellar black holes, it's countless trillions of years. Not much change of studying that, even if you could get close enough. For mini black holes, these subatomic ones they think will be created, the theory indicates that they will evaporate in a tiny fraction of a second, making it possible to study an evaporating black hole.

Probably. Which is why they're eager to experiment, to get information never known before.
 
I drew this a while ago, I believe it to be the most accurate representation of what will happen when they finally begin testing the LHC in October 2008.

watyj9.jpg
 
Nostradamus quatrain 9 44:

Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
"Raypoz" will exterminate all who oppose him,
Before the coming the sky will show signs
 
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