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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."
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.
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...
Quirky? That's strange. If only you'd written it as "quarky", it would have been a truly beautiful and charming joke.
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.
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."
Reminds me of an old physics joke:
"I've wanted to do the two-slit experiment for years, but my wife won't let me!"
To which the reply was:
"Good luck with that. Try explaining to her afterwards that you couldn't tell which slit you came through. You'll be sleeping next to the particle collider for a month."
Don't know where this came from though; it's not original to me...
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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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it would have been a truly beautiful and charming joke
Well, that post up there was a strange one. Those of us down here salute you.
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.
If all you're colliding with is other hardons, then I don't think it's the ladies you're impressing...
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
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.
'd be cool if his name was Atom Smasha.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Yeesh, you need to put a different spin on it. Besides, we all know you merely lepton this thread to post someting strange. Oh, incidently, quantum cats muon and on.
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)
Edward Teller had a concern about atmospheric nitrogen undergoing fusion, essentially igniting the entire atmosphere. He got together with a couple of other Manhattan Project physicists and showed that it was not just unlikely, but impossible. With this concern laid to rest, they knew that it was safe (so to speak) to detonate the bomb.
It was one of the other physicists (not the ones with whom Teller collaborated on the above report) who kept talking about it afterward, and allowed the story to live on, much to the annoyance of a number of Manhattan Project researchers.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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."
You know, they always tell you your hadron is "large", but that doesn't mean anything.
-Peter
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
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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Taking your claim at face value, I would respond by stating that he was or they were fools for doing so. Instead, they ought to have revoked tax exempt status for religious organizations (which contribute nothing to human progress and have not done so for thousands of years) and used that revenue to fund science.
Thank you for pointing this out so we can remind ourselves that partisan politics are silly and politicians are deeply fallible. And for that very reason, each and every person ought to be concerned about the doings of their government so that they become educated about and engaged in its proper function.
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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
Never mind those other fiddley little details. What I want to know is "What jurisdiction do we file the class action litigation in?"
The film is not the finest representation of the project. It's nice, but I winced when I heard that line - what amounts to a jobs program for physicists.
The reality is that there are a number of good reasons to be doing this. There are an enormous number of tech spinoffs that result (you're using one of them). Medical, industrial, informatics, etc - we're solving problems (out of necessity) that the rest of the world hasn't even run into yet. The data rate from one detector is greater than every human being on Earth having 20 phone conversations at once.
We're one of the reasons that the internet was developed to its present form.
But mostly that's good for telling politicians why to fund us, so they can do cost-benefit analyses with Beltway bandits and justify the expenditure to the OMB without being scalped. The real reason for all this is
We Are Not Human Beings If We Don't Explore.
We become sheep. We surf the web and watch network TV and do stuff that is fun but stagnant. Or stuff that is not fun and even more stagnant.
Poking at the fundamental levels of our knowledge is quite different from Googling the result - and takes time, money and expertise. These questions we're asking right now - we're asking them because we hunger for the real story. Fortunately, it's relatively cheap to do so. 5 billion in national terms is the price of a nice dinner in personal terms. In international terms, it's chump change. We'd do it cheaper if we could - but it's hard to examine things a octillion time smaller than you.
We pay it - though there are worthy causes that could benefit from that cash - because succumbing to stagnation is to deny who we are, to turn our backs on the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and to declare as a civilization that we're done looking forward - we're happy with what we are now. We roll over and go to sleep.
I stand for something better.
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.
I was going to ask the same question.
I normally treat conspiracy theory stuff with a bit of disdain, but having read about John Titor and his predictions back in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq, I began to wonder. Like most, I was shocked when the World Trade Center attacks happened. Yet less than two years later, any sympathy I had for the US had vanished when I began to see what the US government was heading towards - a totalitarian police state. Readers of Orwell would not fail to notice the similarities.
It's funny. Time travel is usually held to be the most unlikely science fiction event to occur in reality (well, alongside matter transporters a la Star Trek I suppose). Yet there are some quite disturbing revelations that Titor predicted that really do seem to be happening. I've read them through thoroughly enough that I decided that 2007 was my litmus test on whether it was likely real enough or not to begin making at least some preparations as suggested by him.
So I will be very keenly watching what happens once the LHC starts up. If they make that black hole and contain it, as Titor predicted, then I will be willing to believe that the rest of his predictions are at least probably going to come true, if not exactly as specified by him (see more info on him as to why time variance comes into play).
More info here to get readers started:
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
You might be quite surprised at how much of those "predictions" are starting to come true, and what that portends for our world in the next 20 years.
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