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Happy 50th Cern!
Anonymous Coward writes "The facility that has earned three scientists Nobel prizes, provided the impetus for Berners-Lee's hypertext program (aka the WWW), oh and has also helped answer some fundamental questions regarding the universe has turned fifty today! And with the LHC in development, here's hoping for another 50!"
I have Anonymous Coward's email address! I shall let him know how I feel about him.
Happy Birthday?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
And a happy fiftieth! *toast* Seriously though, this just rocks. :)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Or just the usual Nobel prizes...
/. :-P
I know I know, it's alright on
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.asp
"The facility that has earned three scientists Noble prizes..."
And, really, which prize is more noble than the Nobel?
Unix: Where
"Today, the Geneva facility is at the forefront of developing the Grid, a "super-internet" which will enable physicists to handle the surge of data that will come out of the LHC."
Is it me, or is that like a geeky sweet nothing in the ear?
Scientists believe this machine, due to come online in 2007, will enable them finally to understand why all the things we can see and touch have mass.
;-)
No, the only thing that we can see (a photon of certain wavelength) does not actually have mass!!! BBC got it wrong...
Paul B.
Ooo great persons who have contributed to the growth of porn.
Im non-Anon!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
This article in Physics Today discusses the huge budget that CERN operates within as well as some rather large cost overages. So, put some cash in that birthday card!
http://www.busyweather.com/
and the folks at fermilab celebrated with cake!
Can humanity possibly put a price on knoledge? Is there a limit to the ammount of money we should spend to learn - to further our understanding of the world around us?
/mod me off topic if you want
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
And with the LHC in development, here's hoping for another 50!
With the LHC in development, it could be all over within another 50 years. (Over in the sense that all that's left are questions like 'What is energy?')
It's not "Cern", it's C.E.R.N., or at the very least CERN. And it's not "Noble" prizes, it's "Nobel" prizes. And Tim Berners-Lee created HTML, not the WWW (HTML is just one of the many languages used in the WWW, and it can be used outside the WWW, too). And I'm pretty sure the universe hasn't turned 50 today.
Here's the LHC home page for those who want more than a fluffy news media articlea ge/
http://lhc-new-homepage.web.cern.ch/lhc-new-homep
If I wasn't making this comment, I'd mod down that moron ASAP...
Come to think of it, this is the least useful post I've ever made on Slashdot. Should I be proud of that?
Goo goo g'joob.
Try not to mention any of the Illuminati connections... that would be rather uncouth.
Love the Third Amendment?
Geez posters, run a spell-check!
oh and has also helped answer some fundamental questions regarding the universe has turned fifty today!
Too bad it didn't answer samzenpus's regarding the comma.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
grr, samzenpus's questions I mean...
It is Ceren who turned 50, although she looks 12.
Now if you'll indulge me in a gratuitous attempt at being insightful, I was recently contemplating that in the long run, mastering electromagnetic waves might have been the most disasterous technological breakthrough in history. Of course, we'll never know for sure until at least a few decades or centuries, but the significance of the telephone and semiconductor cannot be underestimated. How can we be so sure that they are Good Things?
There's that quote about our technology surpassing our humanity, blah blah, and everyone always talks about cloning or flying cars or laser guns that kill without a bang (karma whore opportunity to link to the short story here). Rarely do people think about the present in that context and almost never to history. I think there is a good argument that the telephone was perhaps the first moment in history where technology played an active role in replacing a person's community. I could be full of crap (likely) but maybe THAT was the moment when our technology surpassed our humanity.
Nothing else made it possible to import someone else's community into our own. It wasn't a night and day shift from postal service to IRC addicts and kids in rural states expressing violent rage somehow related to pop culture (and I'm trolling here about violence on TV creates violence in Colorado - bear with me). The miracle of communcations at the speed of electromagnetism made it possible to inject someone else's society, customs, culture, values, ethics, and attitude into our own, no matter how poorly those things fit.
Before this stuff, if you wanted to disconnect yourself from your neighbors and your community, you were a freaking recluse - the town outcast, the weirdo who never left his house, the werewolf (karma whore opportunity to link to the hypothesis that werewolf stories grew out of society's earliest serial rapists/murderers), the drunkard, et cetera. Now you're just a normal guy/gal whose "community" consists of Jon Stewart (I'm guilty of that), CNN, Fox News if you must, Martha Stewart, Hollywood, The Sopranos, and so on. I grew up in a small town in the midwest but now I live in suburban D.C. and don't know the name of a single person in my apartment building.
Are we so sure that the future is where our technology surpasses our humanity? Are we so sure that the "technological revolution" is such a GOOD thing? I'm not even whining about violence on TV or in the movies - I'm whining about the fact that all these great inventions make it SO EASY for me to replace the life that surrounds me with a life that's imported from 3,000 miles away.
And this isn't some holier-than-thou rant, either. I'm just as guilty of living in the midst of all of this as anyone. I'm not suggesting some plan of action, either. I just wonder if, in The Big Book of Human History, there will be a chapter called, "Instantaneous Global Communication and the Five Hundred Years of Crap that Followed".
No, it was Al Gore who "took the initiative in creating the Internet."
PS - you can't say that's been debunked - that's an exact quote
I was rather taken aback when a few weeks ago, this response got me an earful of "The WEB!?? You guys are responsible for that PORN-FILLED WASTELAND!???"
I guess I'll stick to saying, "I work in a lab."
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rcpt from
550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for m.
Connection closed by foreign host.
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Looks fine to me.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
But isn't that the question? Pasteurization - definitely good. Polio vaccination - definitely good. Separation of church and state - hell that's another debate but I think it's good.
I wouldn't necsessarily say that vaccinations are *definitely* a good thing (medicine -> less death -> overpopulation). Whether or not something is good depends on your own values. What is the good end we should be heading towards? Would the world be better if we had 6 billion people of varying degrees of happiness, or 6 million perfectly happy people?
What's best for the environment? Should we try and maintain it as it was before we evolved? Or how it would be now had we not existed? Or even how it would be if we had only developed the barest minimum of technology to sustain ourselves, and if so what is that limit? Should we preserve from extinction animals that are being wiped out by natural selection, or only those that we are contributing to the extinction of? And how do we *know* what's related to our activities and what's not?
These kinds of questions are my main problem with the 'green' or environmental movement. Exactly what are their goals? What would be an acceptable state to keep the earth in? If I thought that they even considered these questions, let alone had answers to them, I might be more supportive of them.
It was a sunday when I went, and not that crowded, and my friend took me through a short tour of the place. They have an educational area set up with a museum, and science exhibits for children, which was very cool. All sorts of modern artifacts from nuclear experiments are lying around courtyards. He showed me the server room, where (i think, my friend wasn't sure either) they had some of the first web servers, and where they are now doing the grid computing stuff.
Another cool bit of CERN, especially for physics geeks, is all the streets are named after famous nuclear scientists. I passed by ones named for Einstein, Rutherford, and others. We didn't get to Feynman that day.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
CERN was a nice place to spend an afternoon, and I wish them another 50 great years.
From the LHC@Home FAQ:
"1.2 What does LHC@home do?
LHC@home helps the construction of LHC. It simulates how the particles travel trough the 27 km long tunnel. With the help of the calculated information, the magnets that control the beam can be calibrated with greater precision."
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
And lets hope that the new big gun is up soon so we can not find any Higgs nor supersymmetric particles at higher and higher energies.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
Yes, maybe, but they have a very limited repertoir... (And I suppose you didn't go to Restaurant #3, at the Prevessin site, that's French cuisine at its worst...)
(Reminds me of the heydays of the mad cow disease, when restaurant #1 put up signs assuring that all meat served was Swiss. Problem was only that Switzerland was #2 in number of mad cow disease cases. So now you know how the Mad Scientist enters the picture. And if you wonder about the sheep on the CERN grounds, they are living dosimeters.)
CERN is well worth a try for people who want some experience with working in other countries. AFAIK you need to be started on undergraduate studies in physics, engineering, or computing, and be good at English OR French. First time engagements are normally between two months and three years. The recruitment website explains most of what you need to know. See you here!
Illumination of the LHC ring (ehh...well..sort of) http://trondaks.home.cern.ch/trondaks/images/DSC04 425.JPG
Frozen cake:
http://trondaks.home.cern.ch/trondaks/images/DSC04 439.JPG
Homie fashizzle.
And if you wonder about the sheep on the CERN grounds, they are living dosimeters.
:)
:)
Are you sure about this? I'm actually kind of curious, because CERN is not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to see a bunch of sheep grazing. The story I've heard (quite possibly an urban legend of sorts) is that back in the day, some king decided that a certain family would have permanent grazing rights to the land that CERN would eventually be built on, and when CERN was built, the organization had to respect those grazing rights.
After some cursory googling, I was unable to find any webpage that substantiates this story, but it does seem that the sheep are privately owned. (This webpage briefly mentions the "privately owned sheep" at CERN.) If you (or anybody else) can point me to an authoritative explaination of the sheep, I'd appreciate it...
To be honest, I find the "living dosimeters" explaination a little hard to believe on a number of levels. The sheep aren't always in the same place (I see them only sporadically on the hill in front of Restauant 2), they're privately owned, and besides, how do you get a good measurement of radiation levels out of a bunch of sheep?
Your diatribe reads like the Unabomber's manifesto. I hope you don't live alone in the wilderness.
an ill wind that blows no good
Was there a song, which was on alternative radio around 1994, that mentioned CERN?
For some reason I think there was, but I can't remember anything else.
And to think, in fifty years they've smashed so many particles together... but I could still smash more in a moment by whipping a tennis ball against the wall...
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
This will not do. No one will buy records from a happy gangsta rapper.
...expect to see CERN generate the world's first localised, contained black hole in 2007.
If this occurs, and the US has continued down the path it's on now, you can pretty safely say that John Titor was indeed a real time traveller, and that the US is headed for nuclear destruction around 2015.
If those two major events don't occur, then Titor could reasonably be surmised to be a fake.
Anyway, keep your mind open and read some more:
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
Visceral Psyche Films
You could even get "l33t" knowledge cheaply, if you know where to look.
You could probably get extensive knowledge of nuclear weapon technology from an out-of-work Russian scientist for the price of a few bottles of Vodka. The only trick there is to get it out of him before he is either bought out by Iran (for six cases of Vodka and a trip to a sunny country) or he expires of liver cirrhosis.
No one should try to read the acronym.
Indeed. Any name including the word "nuclear" in it, will systematically scare off the mass audience. "Nuclear" is too much linked to Chernobyl, nuclear power plant, nuclear bomb. A detail you think? Not at all, see CERN home page... And the result is "The world's largest particle physics laboratory". See the CERN in seven questions. Emphasis is put on "particle physic" not on "nuclear"
Research performed at CERN is so abstract that no common mortal can imagine what is done there. The name of the institution is the only thing one can hang on. Actually "CERN" is still in use because it is in too many places to be replaced. But officially the lab should be referred to as something like "particle physics laboratory".
External image is actually pretty important to CERN. Because CERN always have to answer the tax payer's question "why the heck am I giving money for some dark fundamental whatever?" If the answer contains a "nuclear" somewhere, that's already a bad feeling passed on. I worked there a short while. One of my guru told me: "computer science there is 50% tech, 50% psychology". I guess CERN public advertisement is 95% psychology. Not to be underestimated.
I love CERN. :-)
..being in Dan Brown's "angels and demons?" Having spent most of my time at CERN getting around on the No. 9 bus, i always wondered where they kept all the "high-speed civil transports"...
You cannot actually 'see' photons as photons do not interact with themselves to first order and thus would be useless as a means of detecting the presence of other photons.
-M@