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."

Comments

Low content

[Umbral Blot]

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)

OK, jokes are fine, but . . .

[treeves]

does anyone have anything interesting to say about it?
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. . .not that I think it's likely to really happen.

a little hasty

[grahamrow]

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...

Re:a little hasty

[grahamrow]

I was handed some very Fortran-esque C code (run in several steps) and have been converting that into C++. There is an official framework called Athena, which is written in C++ as well... when I spoke about the drawbacks of the software I was speaking about just that. I have been developing outside of the framework because my work is more geared towards calibration and alignment, and I do not need to take advantage of some of the more finicky functionality supplied by the framework. For those interested... all the muon spectrometer data gets spit out as 32 bit words with various headers. There is lots of interesting computing to be done, since every track fit I am currently doing is "blind" and results in 2^6 * (a few hundred) regressions to find the best candidate (and then 10 billion tracks in a file). Of more interest is the network backbone extending from CERN (tier 0) to Brookhaven Labs (Tier 1) to a few Tier 2 facilities such as BU (where I am.) The sheer volume of data spit out of these detectors requires some very interesting techniques. Sorry that was rambling...

Interesting professional history...

[PurifyYourMind]

"...he has also been a physics teacher, television producer, science writer and goat herder."

Lest we forget ...

[dlasley]

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;