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World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion
evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."
Somebody wake Jodie Foster up, the machine is nearly ready!
liqbase
when you hear a rising call from their labs...Quarrk, Quarrkk, Quark!
Cool - I didn't know CERN was on the web :)
Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet? Maybe a little sightseeing on the ISS would be a good idea about that time. That would buy me a couple extra weeks.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I was wondering when we'd have the equipment to smash the world's largest atom!
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I hear they're trying to pass a law in congress defining a traditional meson as being between one quark and one anti-quark.
there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.
Because smashing atoms the old way was sooo Web 1.0
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
HEP research in the United States is grinding to a halt. The DOE has nothing on the board for Fermilab, SLAC, etc. past 2010. While I admire and respect the work the Europeans are doing ( with little help from the US ), I am deeply concerned that this nation is losing its way. Basic R&D is the foundation that made the US what it was in the 20th century. We are doing less and less of it everyday. Unless the Clowns^H^H^H^H^HEsteemed politicians in Washington wake up soon, the US will soon become a second rate nation.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It may be worth noting that some of the design work on this amazing project was actually done by Slashdot readers with no background in particle accelerators. LHC@home is a distributed computing project using the SixTrack program that helps simulate particles' travel in the accelerator to study the stability of their orbits. It has been critical data to the scientists that have been working on the project.
Paper Pusher
The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion.
Huh? You're making that up. Completely making that up. Compute particle energy x number of particles in the loop, it's nothing in macroscopic terms. LHC will be capable of heavy ion collisions at energy levels of 1150 teraelectron volts, which sounds really impressive (and it is, on the quantum scale), but here in the big world that's only one ten-thousandth of a joule.
The parent makes a point that should be stressed.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.
Astrophysicist David Lindley wrote The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory, a book that explains the current state of affairs in high-energy physics and astrophysics.
As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.
I'm more concerned about the probability of a resonance cascade scenario...
By the way, have you seen my crowbar?
5468652047616D65
The reason why research is slowly grinding to a halt in the United States is because the people of the United States have finaly realized that you do not have to spend billions of dollars to get the answers to 'life the universe and every thing else". Just go to the holy book of your choice. The answers are all there.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I am sorry, but while relatively well informed, your post is not right on the mark.
First of all, particles of energies higher than 10^20eV have been observed in several experiments since the first observation in Utah in 1991. Just google for ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) or "oh my god particle". The existence of these particles above the GZK cut-off is not really a disputed fact.
The study and theoretical understanding of these UHECRs are in fact becoming a sub-field of its own today, and I have seen it come up again and again in the last couple of years at conferences.
The point here is that the GZK cut-off only applies to particles originating _very_ far away (more than 50 mega parsecs), since an UHECR produced "locally" could reach us without having a significant change to interact with the cosmic microwave background. The current theoretical puzzlement thus does not have to do with the observation of particles violating some fundamental law, but is due to the fact that people do not know of any "local" source in our neighbourhood which could produce particles of such high energies. There is certainly no indication that this affects the SM, and certainly not the big bang theory.
Of course, as a particle physicist, I would *hope* that the effects are due to physics beyond the SM, but I would guess it is more likely that the answer is going to be that we do not understand all astrophysical objects as well as we had hoped.