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Short Film About CERN's Large Hadron Collider
Lobster911 writes "Seedmagazine.com has posted a new film, Lords of the Ring, about CERN's Large Hadron Collider. NESTA fellow Alom Shaha takes us through the world's largest machine, as he lets the scientists who work at CERN explain the LHC and what they hope to accomplish with it. The highly-anticipated collider is set to start up in 2007, running at full speed by 2008."
Ok, show of hands. Who read 'hard-on collider' the first time? (Ouch, that kinda sounds painful)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
...though not as impressive as my very own Large Hardon Collider, as many ladies can atest.
Including previews and ads, the film runs approximately 1.67 picoseconds, but at relativistic speeds, it seems like hours.
The video was a little low on content (I guess it was aimed at a more general audience). I think they should have spent a little more time explaining why re-creating conditions at the big bang will NOT create a second big bang that will obliterate the universe. (yes, some people actually worry about that)
Philosophy.
welcome our truth revealing over-lords.
The very title of the video indicates that the quirky, sense-of-humour absense is still rife amongst particle physicists.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The highly-anticipated collider is set to start up in 2007, running at full speed by 2008.
When I read this I thought they were talking about Windows Vista.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Yes
I have freaks! I did something right...
Three particles of neutrons uncharged in our eye,
Seven of electrons with no atoms to call home,
Nine of protons from which Hydrogen we did pry,
One ring for the Physicists on their dark thrones
In the Land of Sweden where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to collide them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Sweden where the Shadows lie.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
actually, 1/3 speed. 75ns bunch crossing time as opposed to 25ns.
The highly-anticipated collider is set to start up in 2007, running at full speed by 2008."
It's going to take a year to get those particles up to full speed? Heavy.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Religious fundamentalists complaining that we do not need to spend billions of dollars figuring out what happened at the so-called “Big Bang” (God created the universe, afterall) and that those funds would be better spent on more ambitious projects that would help save America from immorality and godlessness.
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Does the movie start out
"One Large Hadron Collider to rule them all, one Large Hadron Collider to find them, one Large Hadron Collider to bring the protons, and in the 14 teraelectron darkness bind them" ?
We wonders, precious, we wonders...
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
One of the things common with very basic research is that it's hard to justify what benefits will come out of it. The first folks playing with radioactive materials all died of cancer, little knowing their sacrifice would completely change geopolitics for decades to come.
The collider will give us a better view of basic particle interactions. Will it give us anti-gravity or make our teeth whiter? Probably not, but unexpected things will likely come of it.
does anyone have anything interesting to say about it? .not that I think it's likely to really happen.
I read on a theoretical physics blog (yes, there are such things) that there is a fear that this LHC might actually generate black holes.
link
Now that could make things very interesting, for a short time. .
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
At first gland I thought it said hardon.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Clearly, this is what happens when dislexyia and a dirty mind meet.
Some people believed that blowing up a nuclear weapon on this planet could start a world-wide chain reaction that would not stop by itself, we still blew it up :)
You can't handle the truth.
'd be cool if his name was Atom Smasha.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
if at the moment they crank this thing up to full speed that the universe is suddently obliterated? Who should then be blamed? The scientists that built this thing that makes Big Bang II or by a god with a really twisted sense of humor?
Yup! I always end up reading it that way. I chalk it up to years of exposure to Beavis & Butt-head.
"Large Hadron Collider"
I had to read that twice to figure out it had to do with physics, not physiques.
That read this as hardon collider and then get confused to why this is on Slashdot?
As an undergrad writing software to help align the muon spectrometer, I have been surprised to learn how behind the software is with the hardware. After attending a workshop at Harvard I was informed that segfaulting is normal behavior at the end of a reconstruction run? I will be surprised if everything is working as grandly as this video's creators would have us believe. Also take note that I am an undergrad writing software to align the muon spectrometer, they must be behind...
"...he has also been a physics teacher, television producer, science writer and goat herder."
No, you are not alone my perverted friend, it is near the end of the day for me, but I thought, damn, that sounds like a gay porn movie... not that i'd know... of course...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
You know, they always tell you your hadron is "large", but that doesn't mean anything.
-Peter
They will create a black hole that will destroy us all.
I am going to drink beer until then.
Three rings for the synchotron-kings under the phi,
Seven for the cyclotrons in their shields of stone,
Nine for superconducting supercolliders doomed to die,
One for the CERN Lord in his quark Hadron
In the Alps of Switzerland where the gluons lie.
One Ring to hew them all, One Ring to grind them
One Ring to smash them all and in the black holes slime them
In the Alps of Switzerland where the gluons lie.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The barren tunnels outside Wakahachie, Texas house a testament to the U.S. attempt:
America's Discarded Superconducting Supercollider:
Anyone know what the total cost will be? The U.S. version was supposed to top $US 8 billion, and I saw something about a U.S. government grant of $US 500 million in the late 90s. Curious to know if there were lessons learned and if the approach wound up making more fiscal sense.
&laz;
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
its the detectors. The size and complexity are amazing and if you have a chance to do a tour of RHIC, FNAL or any of the many others make sure you do. I do have photos but I'm not silly enough to post a link to them here ;)
at last, they will start true research into anti-matter. ive been waiting and watching CERN for awhile now. just think of the possibilities if they can harness the power of antimatter. a somewhat safer alternaitve to nuclear, allthough if it gets out of hand it can be just as devastating...without the nuclerar fallout, though
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
Nuff said
AT&ROFLMAO
The short folm begins when CERN "scientist" Candii orders a pizza...
You don't have to install Itunes to get quicktime. ON the download page, click on the link that says "Quicktime Standalone Installer"
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Don't ever apply for a job at Bomber Command....
The Clinton Administration, not known for its religious fundementalism, killed the Supercollider to divert funds to social programs.
an ill wind that blows no good
We can only hope.
Proving once again that the quickest route to a nerd's heart is porn and particle physics. :P
~X~
~X~
I know lot's of physicist that have hardons when they enter the cathedral(LHC)...
Is it just me, or does Dr. Brian Cox look and talk a lot like Vince Noir from the Mighty Boosh? He's just missing the funky clothes and the fancy hairdo :) see http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/tv/mightyboosh/
If this is a troll, masterfully executed and I salute you.
If not, then you have some fairly bizarre notions. I think it is not, so allow me to make some comments.
Certainly the desired intent.
Alright, 80% of the world population is theistic. Seems right. But in addition to many divisions of belief, what has been believed has changed for all recorded human history. Religion that has fallen out of fashion is regarded today as silly nonsense. We do not revile people because they reject Zeus or do not call pharaoh a god. We have evolved improved sensibilities about the natural world and society. It may take a thousand years, but we will one day laugh at all the religions of today the same way we now laugh at river gods and fire spirits.
Perhaps a lifetime. Instead of engaging myself with the task of improving the human race, I have wasted it chasing after an invisible man in the sky. One might as well spend a life believing in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy.
I am an atheist and I too have morals. I know I should not commit violence against people because I would not want others to commit violence against me. I know I should not steal or cheat for the same reason. It is purely logical for me to follow certain principles and adhere to morals, without some supernatural entity threatening me with punishment. It is logical because I have a survival instinct which makes me avoid injury. Also, human beings are social creatures since society increases our chances of survival. Harming others harms the group, thus diminishing our prosperity. In my opinion, these are much better reasons to live morally than threats of eternal fire and brimstone. Morals do not come from religion and they never have. Furthermore, not all religious people have “high morals,” such as those whom use their religion to write moral blank checks which they cash to commit acts of rape and cold-blooded murder.
But do you not see that critism is the only way to progress! I “complain” because I care. I see faults and I want to understand those faults such that they can be corrected. That is akin to the scientific method which seeks to disprove claims so that only those which are true become establish facts. And then they are questioned again and again. Critism is the crucible of knowledge and it is an ever-tempering force. If we resort to patting each other on the back, proclaiming to one another of how righteous and great we are, we will go nowhere.
Whew. Where to begin. Thank you for your concern, but I am well-employed. I prefer natural food to cheesy poofs, but I must admit I enjoy a fine glass of wine and even, dare I mention, a nice dry, gin martini from time to time. Such are lifes little pleasures. I personally have had no abortions given that I am a male, ho
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If you'd like to pitch in yourself and help the LHC project, running LHC@Home is a great way! They use your CPU cycles to simulate particles traveling in the LHC. The server might be out of work units at the moment, but there are, of course, other cool projects that use the same BOINC client that you might not have heard of, like Einstein @ Home that helps the LIGO project searching for gravity waves.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
Maybe this is what John Titor was saying ?
Beavis: "Ahhh... shaddup Butthead. Or, I'm gonna have to lay the smackdown on your ass. Beyotch"!
Ahh yes, Beavis and Butthead. WAY BETTER than Southpark any day.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My comment appears to have stirred up some activity.
Join Tor today!
Large Hadron, Lords of the Ring; I'm surprised no one has managed to come up with an immature joke or two about this.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I got out of Physics after they cancelled the SSC (the Superconducting Supercollider, now the stupid trench in Waxahachie, TX) but other people went on to work on the LHC. Christ, that was a decade and a half ago! And now it's done, more or less. If I hadn't quit basic research and gone into software engineering, I'd be so frustrated by now... oh wait... shit!
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain.
Does this mean it's only running at half speed in 2007, and 1/4 speed here in 2006? Does this mean that the collisions are only fender-benders that don't even deploy the airbags in the particles yet?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The lone "Dr." in the film tries to justify the 10 or 11 billion $$$ the thing is costing by saying that 2200 physicists are participating. That group's incredibly high ego-density alone should produce the conditions they're looking for.
I can see it now: the first paper they publish will take up an entire year's worth of Nature (that's 52 issues) just to print the damn authors. It will get published there regardless of what they find or don't find, and 95% of the text will be essentially an engineering report. Oh, and then 75% of any claims they make will be retracted within a couple years, but it will be referred to as a "refinement of their results."
The whole thing feels like a piece of propaganda for experimentalists, at the expense of theorists. Hmm, are they really that insecure about their raison d'etre, despite hiding 100m safely under ground?
Oh well, at least they will all be paid for a few years. Pints all around!
My final dig: To the probable 1000 or so grad students making this their research project, what will be your piece of important novel science worthy of a Ph.D. dissertation? "I made sure all the control computers had sufficiently stupid hostnames, like charmquark and drwho."
Not that I'm against the project at all, they all should just be pretty humble about their part in it, especially the dork who made this sub-par film. Isn't there something he could be machining with the time he spent on this? Guess not, they contract out all the critical work.
At timecode 1:39 he claims that the protons are travelling around the 27km at 50,000 times/second. This gives them a speed of 1.3m km/sec, over 4 times the speed of light ;). Impressive!
Apparently they travel 11,000 times a second around the 27km, reaching 0.999997828 the speed of light.
LHC Facts
"If A equals success, then the formua is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut" - A Einstein.
Lords of the ring is the title of a gay porno film.
Seriously, is it that hard to do a title search before you release a film?
yup, its the dysexia alright
What did John Titor have to say about this?
...a lot of us on ATLAS are in Stockholm, Sweden at this week for a meeting. Hopefully this won't be the only trip to Stockholm that ATLAS physicists will make though :-)
Clinton is indeed a fool. But Judeo-Christian ideas are a vital component of western secular law. In that sense religion has contributed much. Your secular liberal ideas did not just spring into being. They evolved from ideas with religious roots. To not acknowledge that is to be ignorant of your own philosophy. The funding of science is not obligatory but should be accomplished through the mechanism of representative democracy. The decision to cancel the supercollider was made in this framework.
...and then they should vote for the conservative candidate.
an ill wind that blows no good
I've been to CERN twice, spending a combined month or so there with my research. Most of the second time I was underground as we were installing my university's hardware contribution into the ATLAS Cavern. It's still very much considered a construction zone, so hard hats and steel toe shoes are mandatory, even when you're just in the electronics rooms. It's fun seeing all the old PhDs running around looking like construction foremen.
Anyway, what I liked most about the film was highlighting the importance of the cafeteria. Although most of the collaboration is done either by email or occasionally webcam, I think the biggest decisions are made with a beer in hand, enjoying the weather, and either staring off towards Mont Blanc (which most of the time is too hazy to discern, but when it's clear, it's beautiful), or watching the nightly game of football (soccer). The beer may not be important for all decisions- the mini bottles of wine could probably work just as well.
What I didn't like in the film was when in the LHC tunnel, the one guy was talking about collisions, mentions ATLAS, and then immediately after they started showing shots of the CMS detector. There is a great but friendly competition between the ATLAS and CMS groups. Building 40 (which houses the ATLAS and CMS offices), basically pits the two opposite one another. When you walk in the central hub, everything to your left is CMS, and everything to the right is ATLAS. The small cafe in the center is the only spot not claimed by either group. Even then, once getting anything from the cafe, CMS people take their food to the tables on their half of the building, and ATLAS to their own side. So although the average person may say it's nothing, I think a lot of ATLAS people would roll their eyes when seeing the movie, thinking that people watching it would mistake the CMS for ATLAS.
Finally, another movie (which won awards!) that starts off giving an overview of ATLAS and the LHC, but then goes back and gives a brief history of 400 some years of scientific experimentation is available here - http://www.atlas.ch/movie.html. Enjoy.
The deficiency and depravity of most of these civilizations highlight my point. Secularists like yourself see the law and concepts of freedom as self-evident. They are not. Judeo-Christian values inspire secular law, they do not create it.
an ill wind that blows no good
I noticed a new universal unit of measurement mentioned in the film: EB/sec, or 'Encyclopedia Brittanicas per second'. While this is clearly a derivitive unit from the base knowledge unit 'Encyclopedia Brittanicas', I don't think I've ever heard EB/sec before as a unit of speed of information generation. Very useful.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Flashforward, a novel by Robert J. Sawyer, begins with the initial LHC power-up at CERN. Recommended.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Scientists are famous for writing bad, but mostly functional code. The two disciplines don't have much in common, so the usually the coding end of it suffers. It's difficult for a computer scientist to write the code without understanding what's going on, and I suspect most scientists would rather pay their own grad students than some outsider who might do a better job. Coupled with the fact that FORTRAN is still used (and all the problems that come with it), and it's easy to see why the software is so far behind everything else. Hardware isn't much different. From what I've seen and heard it's often jury rigged with bubble gum and bailing wire.
AccountKiller
"Gentlemen, we will harness the power...of antimatter!!!"
...
"I said, we will harness...the power...of ANTIMATTER!"
...
"Okay, whose job was it to bring the #$*@ antimatter???"
"Hey, don't look at me! I brought the regular matter."
This is the kind of research I was aiming for when I started my b.sc in physics. Never had the cash to finish my master's, and although I was studying in Canda, my average and my GRE were both too low to get an opportunity to do a doc in the states.
I want to help. I want to learn more. I'm sure I have skills that can be used in that kind of research.
The only interesting career path I see right now is Project Manager, and it's scaring me.
GET ME OUT OF HERE!
(.. and I'll know in around two weeks if I can do contract work. My wife's probably got her permanency at the Government, but I just want to be sure we're not both working on contract)
destoo@gmail
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC