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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
Cool - I didn't know CERN was on the web :)
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"
The thinking is that any black holes that are created by the LHC would be so small that they would evaporate in an instant, probably within milliseconds of devouring the earth and sun. So there's nothing to worry about really.
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. "
Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?
b lack_holes.html:
I don't think there is really much to worry about. I have read a few articles on the subject and it seems highly unlikely anything catastrophic could happen if small black holes are created. Here are some quotes from one interesting article http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060919_
"Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, before they could gobble up any significant amount of matter"
and
"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.
"However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.
At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."
So, if Hawking is right we should be safe and even if he is wrong it sounds like we should still be safe. Of course nobody knows for sure which is somewhat scary but I don't think it means we should scrap the whole project in this particular case.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.
They weren't exactly sure what would happen when they set off the first atom bomb either.
Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.
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
>"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."
Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?
Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.
Ha, I agree that we must out do the dino's, that would be quite funny. The problem with wiping ourselves out with a black hole is a passing alien craft may detect a black hole where our civilization used to be but they would probably have no idea we even existed.
That is why I think wiping ourselves out with self-replicating nano bots would be much more funny. Then a passing alien craft would come across a milky way sized swarm of these nano bots and think to themselves "what dumbass civilization did this to themselves?".
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I'm more concerned about the probability of a resonance cascade scenario...
By the way, have you seen my crowbar?
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