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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.
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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.
No. Superconductors generate exactly ZERO ohmic heating when current passes through them.
Not "some", but absolutely ZERO heating.
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
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.
HTC technology is not available yet for applications like this. They are using conventional Sn3Ti (and NbTi to some extent) superconductors. I'm not sure how the Wikipedia quote is relevant here. Although the wires in LHC are made of LTS materials, the materials still are type II superconductors. The main reason to have large cooling capacity is a phenomenon called "quenching". The wires in the coils are actually made of really thin filaments of superconducting material inside a copper matrix. These filaments can (and do) go out of superconducting state because of a local problem, and at this small point there's naturally high ohmic heating. If the system can't respond quickly enough to lower the local temperature so that the superconducting state is restored, this point of normal state will start to spread at a high speed, causing more heating and boiling off the coolant quite expensively. So this is the reason why you need large cooling capacity and thermal conductivity.
U+F8FF
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.
Nope. ANY superconductor has zero resistance. That's actually a part of definition for a superconductor.
Even high-temperature ones (with some caveats near critical temperature and in strong magnetic fields) have zero resistance.
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.
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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
Right, the correct answer is the cold void where Cheney's heart used to be.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No. One more time: there's NO resistance. In one experiment, for example, there were no measurable current decrease in a magnet after 20 years.
Low-TC superconductors are preferable because they have much higher critical current. Superconductors lose their superconductivity when a high enough magnetic field is applied. This magnetic field can be external or generated by the current passing through the superconductor itself.
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
1.9 K is below the so-called "lambda point" of helium, which stands at 2.2 K. That point corresponds to a transition to the superfluid state. This may help with heat dissipation in this setup.
Caveat emptor is not english either. Caveat is latin for warning. See Wikipedia. So when someone says "with some caveats in strong magnetic fields" it is technically incorrect. Since "with some warnings in strong magnetic fields" isn't what he intended to say. However, caveat can be used correctly on its own. E.g. He entered the cave dispite his companion's caveat.
try { Signature mysig = new CleverAttempt(); } catch(NonCleverSignatureException e) { postanyway(); }
So, how much resistance is there in a Superconductor? A tiny bit?
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.
Here's a calendar designed to show when the LHC comes online and does its first experiment.
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