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One of the Coolest Places In the Universe
phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."
We built the LHC to look for tits?
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Trying to discover a hypothetical elementary particle, or trying to create Batman's next villain?!
Have they checked behind the couch?
Tongue contact with cold collider parts can result in serious injury.
-- thinkyhead software and media
If the magnets are superconducting, why would they need a good thermal conductor? It's not as if superconductors generate any heat in operation.
And are they really going to push the magnetic fields up to the point where they truly need to cool high-temp superconductors down to the edge of absolute zero? TFA says they're using enormous currents, but doesn't this leave an awful small margin?
Already done www.lhcountdown.com
When they create a black hole and destroy the earth, they can say "but it was such a cool experiment..."
The LHC has nothing on my mom's basement. RIGHT HERE is where it's at, baby. Cool Central.
LHC Countdown
And don't forget to include the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey" Also Sprach Zarathustra
Also appropriate, Is Zarathustra in your pocket or are you just happy to see the LHC going online?
Also appropriate since we might see the birth of another solar system where the LHC used to be.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
so what the fuck?
Sensory overload. I think I melded that story and the previous with the packaging world record...oh wait, there's something happening on my other monitor, can't talk.
Just callin' it like I see it.
In the scifi show Lexx, Earth is a type 13 planet which will shrink to the size of a pea due to physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_in_fiction
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
Because its not being built by Americans. It's being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research, A.K.A. 'CERN' (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire). Thats why its not in the USA, and why its in France.
So whatever the cooling mechanism is removes heat from the volume faster than the microwave background heats it up?
I would have assumed that something this cool would be used to search for the elusive Fonz Particle.
Assuming that the LHC will destroy the Earth, this countdown is also the number of days left to lose your virginity.
When I was growing up, we had to get by on a few millikelvins, and we were grateful for every last one of them!
Indeed, getting 1.9K in a lab, or in a single NMR magnet is not a big deal. Try to do it with 1232 huge magnets, spread around 26.6 km, being some 100m underground, and using 7600 km of super-conducting "cable" (270 000 km of superconducting "strand"). This is roughly 4700 tons of material to keep at 1.9K, and 120 tons of helium being recirculated all the time through these stuff to assure 150 kW of HEAT power is dissipated. Noone ever has done a similar cryogenic installation at such scale before!
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks?
[TheXPhial] vaccuums
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
[TheXPhial] black holes
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
[TheXPhial] lava?
http://www.object404.com
http://www-hep.phys.cmu.edu/cms/PICT_ARCH/lhc_map.gif
Its about 90% under France.
Have you seen the cost of this large hagrid colliding thing? What is the point of wasting all that tax money looking for that higgs boson that, when found, will probably have been stepped on or at least be all dirty. Wouldn't it make more sense just to write the boson off at the next inventory count and just requisition a NEW higgs boson from stores?
Okay, we need to be more environmentally aware now, and less wasteful of materials but this just confirms what people have told me about these CERN guys; they just take stuff to extremes.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Weeell, it is the biggest cryogenic installation ever, the most complex machine ever built, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever, and they're pushing lots of data handling limits, such as network transfer speed, storage space and CPU cycles used. Now, what did I forget?
I agree, it's the scale of the cooldown that's impressive. In fact, when the LHC is running at full power, it will be drawing more power than the entire city of Geneva, and most of that power will go towards cooling.
light does not stop accelerating at 186,000 mps, it travels at 186,000 mps (well... approximately) in a vacuum. it does not accelerate, it travels at a constant speed (as far as we know), so c is a constant. Now it does slow down as it travels through a medium (water, air, crystal), but mostly that is caused by the absorption and re-emmitance (is that a word?) of the photons.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Your own quote clearly says it's in both.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.
Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.
Now tell me, what do you think a reader without any scientific knowledge will take away from this article, that the scale of the cooling is what makes it challenging, or the temperature itself? That 1.9 K is an exotically low temperature for physics experiments, or that it's mundane? This is what bothers me about most science journalism. The misleading statements and lack of information.
Come to think of it, that's the problem with most non-science journalism too.
I came here for a good argument
We can get 0.05 K easily here with one of our dilution fridges or our ADR. 1.9K is nothing to boast about but I guess it's the sheer size of what they are cooling which makes it impressive.
Anyone know the coldest place in the universe?
Please don't say Cheney's heart...
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The apparent movement of galaxies moving away from each other is what gives rise to the notion of the big bang. What if this is just an optical illusion? If matter in the universe is gradually shrinking in size (there is plenty of room for a lot of shrinkage in each atom) by a means we are not yet familiar with (forty standard kilogram weights around the world are mysteriously different weights now), then the universe started off in a superheated cloud and gradually cooled off in our local area. As galaxies shrink, the space between them increases, giving rise to the illusion that they are flying apart (faster and faster), when they could just be staying in relatively the same areas they originally formed in. This explanation, which I call the big collapse, doesn't need the iffy explanation of 'everything coming from a singularity'. It doesn't require the awkward expansion period. It doesn't even require different physics at the time of the creation of our universe, which happened over time, not in a relative instant. The big bang is likely a ludicrous explanation that's helping to lead us down a gigantic blind alley in the advancement of science.
Linux + KDE3 + Kicker, there's an applet kalled KDoomsDay (it's KInstallable from apt in Debian and possibly Kubuntu).
Could you please point me to the American supersonic jetliner?
Thought not - and seeing as how it was bits falling of a US plane that caused the disaster that killed off Concorde, you've got nothing to shout about.
Concorde was an elementally flawed idea - too small and too expensive to develop and run, but I saw the A380 at Farnborough the other day, and that's going to kill Boeing in the next few years, especially if they lose the USAF tanker contract too.
And 'super-massive supercollider'?
That's just a drag strip with 2 SUVs loaded with lard-arsed Yanks playing chicken :o)
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Depends on your point of view. The *apparent* speed of light (group velocity - that is, the speed of wave propagation) in a medium is variable, but individual photons have zero mass, thus *can not* experience acceleration. In terms of basic classical physics, a=F/m, m is 0 - division by zero, the equation is unsolvable, i.e. the concept simply does not apply.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
It's an impressive engineering feat. However, the BBC article presents it as some kind of pure science breakthrough. OMG!!!! COOLER THAN SPACE!!!1!!.
When I first read the article (about two days ago) I was also bemused as to why it warranted a news story. It was only when I thought about the sheer scale of the installation that I realised what CERN PR were pushing...
I think that the original poster is more disappointed about the quality of the journalism than the scale of achievement. I'm a bit fed up of seeing CERN PR stories reprinted in 'serious' news sources because the journalists don't a clue about science. I'm even more fed up when those PR releases get confused by a journalist and sound moronic.
It seems that there's a news story about CERN once a month, and a news story about Gravitational Waves about one every three months. The irritating thing is that neither of these have actually had any major breakthrough for quite some time...and yes, I am a physicist, and I work somewhere similar in flavour, if not scale, to CERN.
So bow down to your creators :)
And makers of great beer.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I didn't mod the comment "Troll", and I don't consider it so. You cannot moderate and comment in the same thread - when you comment, your mods are cancelled.
As for burying it, how else in Europe are you going to build something 27 km across and dead level, with mounting points for thousands of tons of equipment? It is not below a mountain, it is below farmland. Anywhere reasonably flat in Europe is covered with towns and villages and criss-crossed with roads. And the flatness requirement is *exact*, so if the ground is only fairly flat, you will have to have bits in tunnels and/or on stilts anyway. On stilts is bad for carrying heavy loads. And you don't want your hypersensitive particle detectors triggered by cosmic radiation, so they will have to be heavily shielded anyway. Since the equipment needs to be well protected from accidents and weather for purely engineering reasons (big magnets, huge currents, super-cooling, vacuum). I could see problems with those magnets distorting every CRT-based television for hundreds of yards. The reason for burying it is purely for experimental purposes rather than safety. It is re-using the tunnel dug for an earlier detector, decommissioned a few years ago.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.
Liquid helium temperatures are nothing new.
Off of the top of my head, CEBAF (1.4km), Tevatron (6.3km), RHIC (3.8km), and most NMR equipment use liquid helium to cool their low-temperatre superconducting components.
The canceled Superconducting Supercollider would have been 87km long, and have been cooled by liquid helium, had congress not pulled the plug.
Extending the technology to 27km simply requires a bigger investment. That doesn't make it any less impressive, though many of the other engineering aspects of the LHC are far more impressive.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It is not that impressive at all. If you read the article, they are cooling the superconducting magnets with liquid helium. (Nearly?) every university chemistry department will have an NMR spectrometer with a superconducting magnet doing at the same temperature, and many will have a SQUID going colder. So although it is *one* of the coldest places on earth, it is a fairly routine temperature.
Here's a calendar designed to show when the LHC comes online and does its first experiment.
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Okay, so I have a couple of questions then. One of the one-page papers compares the relationship between the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson to the relationship between the Electromagnetic Field and the Photon.
Particles that interact with Electromagnetic fields gain energy, but they can also lose energy in the case of natural energy decay. For example, an electron in a high energy state decays to a lower energy state, giving off a photon / emitting electromagnetic radiation. Similarly, moving charged particles emit an electromagnetic field.
Since interactions between zero-mass particles and the Higgs field gives rise to mass, isn't there also a necessary mechanism for those particles giving up that mass through decay? Also, do moving masses produce changes in the surrounding Higgs field in the form of a traveling wave?
We can detect the presence of an electromagnetic field by observing its effects on particles that we know can interact with it. The supposition here seems to be that all of the basic particles start with zero mass and subsequently gain it from interacting with the Higgs field. Since we "know" that these particles can interact with the Higgs field, how come we cannot detect the Higgs effect on them, which I suppose might be a variation in the mass?
Just some curiosities...