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A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider

Posted by Zonk on from the big-science dept.

davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."

8 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. The Problem with Something this Expensive by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem with something this expensive is that the average person, including myself, cannot see, even if it provides every answer they hope for it, how that will change my everyday life in the least. At least the Space Program gave us Tang.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive by Somnus · · Score: 2, Interesting
      To me endeavors like this are the most perfect expression of man. Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions,


      Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.


      To plunge into the unknown is a moral imperative for any thinking being.

      If all you care about are material practicalities, this thing is roughly 1/50th the current cost of a certain misadventure in the Middle East, and is more likely to produce cool stuff. One particularly exciting bit of technology already is the LHC's grid computing infrastructure.

  2. "Energy Consumption" - WTF? by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts...
    So that means the LHC only uses 2.24 microjoules? Is that per second or per fortnight?
    --
    [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
    1. Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF? by Mr2cents · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hmm.. I thought that each proton would be accelerated to 7 TeV, so when they collide there is a 14 TeV collision. In any case, "energy consumption" is the wrong term.

      --
      "It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
  3. 17 miles. by foodnugget · · Score: 2, Interesting

    seventeen miles? I went to look at the pictures, but i don't see anything that comes close to seventeen miles. Certainly, i don't doubt it, but not knowing much about particle accelerators and supercolliders, i am very curious to get the big picture. If something is seven-teen-miles long, or around, or deep or high, wow, do i really want to see it. or an overlay of it on a map if it is underground!

    Perhaps it is just the structural engineer side of me, but i would love to know more about how they made something that large.

  4. We don't need no stinkin' Higgs by sweetser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sorry Charlie, the animations of the Standard Model are up on YouTube, http://youtube.com/watch?v=ExNPiMcVXww

    U(1) is a unit circle in the complex plane. SU(2) is a unit quaternion which is easy to animate if you have software for the job (barf out thousands of exp(q-q*), sort by time, drive through POVRay). Electroweak is the product of the first two. The animation of SU(3) tells you what the standard model is about, namely the ability to smoothly describe any event seen by an observer at 0,0,0,0. Gravity is about the sizes of things, so scale the ball to different sizes in a smooth way, and that is the symmetry behind gravity.

    It is inertial mass that breaks the symmetry of standard model, not some phony Mexican hat dance around a false god of a vacuum.

    doug

    --
    Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
  5. Power consumption = 14 Tev... ORLY? by DirtySouthAfrican · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ignoring that a TeV is a unit of energy and not power, that's about 2e-6 joules... a flea sneezes more energetically than that. They mean that individual particles can reach this energy. Actual power consumption is probably enough to power a dozen DeLoreans.

  6. There's a youtube of their IT manager by porkThreeWays · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a youtube video out there (I really wish I could find it) and it has the IT manager for the project. I have to wonder a little bit about him because he was asked why they didn't go with the cell processor instead of Intel based processors. His answer was "The P4's have better floating point processing". I could understand a lot of reasons to go with the P4 because there are a lot of good x86 programmers out there and they could reuse a lot of code etc etc. Has anyone else seen this video?

    --
    If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.