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LHC Flips On Tomorrow
BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight."
Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."
I thought tomorrow was when they turned it on. I thought the end of the world was to happen when the first collision is made right?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Everyone out of the universe... QUICK!
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Why would you send death threats to someone you think is going to destroy the world? If he was afraid of dying, he wouldn't be destroying the world, right?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You're all invited to my end of the world party tonight. LSD and hookers will be served.
They will be only sending a beam around the LHC in a single direction at about 7% power. It will be about a month before they send a beam in the other direction and have a collision. I think it is about a year before they will be up to full power.
No possibility of a resonance cascade they said. Put the crystal thing into the spectrometer they said. The whole thing blew up my place of employment and I started Unforeseen Consequences with nothing but a crowbar for a while.
Moral: Keep your crowbars close and your guns closer and don't trust the scientists.
The weirdness has already begun if 9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time is 2:00 to 10:00 CDT.
We're doomed!! Oh God, I can't die a virgin! Virgins may all go to heaven, but only to get screwed by Muslim terrorists!
You just got troll'd!
Intercom 1: (feedback)"Testing, testing. (coughs) Everything seems to
be in order."
Intercom 2: "All right, Gordon. your suit should keep you comfortable
through all this. The specimen will be delivered to you in a few
moments. If you would be so good as to climb up and start the rotors,
we can bring the anti-mass spectrometer to 80 percent and hold it there
until the carrier arrives.
Intercom 2: "Gordon, are you not hearing me? Climb up and start the
rotors, please.
Intercom 2: "Very good. We'll take it from here."
Intercom 1: "Power to stage 1 emitters in 3,2,1. I'm seeing predictable
phase arrays."
Intercom 1: "Stage 2 emitters activating...now."
Intercom 2: "Gordon, we cannot predict how long the system can operate
at this level, nor how long the readings will take. Please, work as
quickly as you can."
Intercom 1: "Overhead capacitors to one oh five percent. Uh, it's
probably not a problem, probably, but I'm showing a small discrepancy
in... well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining
sequence."
Intercom 2: "I've just been informed that the sample is ready, Gordon.
It should be coming up to you any moment now. Look to the delivery
system for your specimen."
I need to hurry up and finish work on my black-hole shelter...
I owe far too much money for that to ever happen.
Shouldn't that be 0.439 TeV? (450 GeV / 1024)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Coming to think of it, maybe that's why it's so hard to detect alien civilisations similar to us in the universe. We only have the tiny window of time between when they discover radio transmission and until they make their LHC and wipe themselves out.
You just got troll'd!
Back in the old days of the cold war, in the schools,for preparation of a nuclear bomb falling, we would get under our desks because they are obviously made of some kind of material that can withstand radiation and a giant percussion wave. I'll bet those desks can withstand the LHC black hole too. Only school children and teachers will be left.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
You guys can't blow up the Earth! It's where I keep all my stuff!
Bow-ties are cool.
Quick, who wants to get laid? My standards have dropped considerably, given the circumstances.
Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
You'll know it too. You'll wake up one day with a Black President or with an old geezer and a MILF for a VP.
Then, and only then, will I worry!
Doctors Karl Kruszelnicki and Kevin Varvell are giving an LHC lecture at the University of Sydney tonight. 7pm at the Footbridge Theatre. Varvell is a contributor to the ATLAS detector. Kruszelnicki is always fun. It includes a live cross to CERN. The lecture was to be in the school of Physics but has had to be transferred to a larger venue due to popular demand.
For some reason, the BBC are making a big thing of this, and providing a lot of coverage and related programmes on the Radio 4 station.
The BBC provide a listen again service for those of you who are distant but interested. Check out the programmes here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/
Assuming that the world isn't swallowed up by a black hole from the experiment, that is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15risk.html
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
The International Space Station gets that (dis)honor, with an estimated cost of $25.6B (US) from 1994 to 2005, not including shuttle costs - and that's just NASA's budget.
So, from that perspective, the LHC is a bargain. And it's probably still cheap compared to what the Superconducting SuperCollider would have ended up costing.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
garethw
Perhaps this is the end of the cycle. Perhaps, this is how our universe was created. And so, every X billion years, we get smart enough, disintegrate the universe, and have to start all over again, evolving from slime.
Perhaps real intelligence will know *not* to switch it on in a few more cycles of this.
Well, it's been nice knowing you all. I'm just off to steal some Porsches (no Ferarri garages nearby), and loot, and plunder booty.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Can you tell us if there is any DANGER! DANGER WILLROBINSON!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
At least in this instantiation of the multiverse, nothing universe-destroying will happen. There will undoubtedly be many - perhaps an infinite number - that will be destroyed. But since I will be telling you I told you so, ipso facto it didn't happen here.
Else we'll never know - nor care.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
LHC has all the latest safety systems... in the event of an actual black hole or strangelet event...
they simply full the lever and hit the button!!
It says.. "Black Hole/Stranglet CRASH button - In case of imminent world destruction, break glass and press CMS ABORT button"
(Yes, that's really in the LHC control room LOL)
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Imagine a road that goes in a circle.
Now, tomorrow, they're going to put ONE CAR on the road
and drive it moderately fast to make sure the road is intact.
Then they will proceed, in future tests, to drive that ONE CAR
faster and faster around the circular road to make sure the road holds up.
On "collision day", the add a SECOND CAR driving in the
OPPOSITE DIRECTION on that circular road.
Then they drive those two cars REALLY REALLY FAST and crash them head-on
into each other.
The point is to try to understand the cars and how they are put together
by analyzing the parts that go flying off in the collision, and the speed
and direction that those parts went flying.
Informative? Well, I suppose his did tell us his birthday. My birthday is February 24th, 1980. Now mod me up!
Has anyone here read about the "Oh-My-God particle"? A proton detected in 1991 with an energy of 3.2±0.9×10^20 eV - that's 51 Joules, an energy you'd expect for a macroscopic object and 10 million times more than the maximum the LHC can produce (7 Tev).
The linked page has some of the relativistic properties calculated for that proton including that "After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds -- 46 nanometres -- behind a photon that left at the same time."