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LHC Success!
Tomahawk writes "It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
(And we're all still alive, too!)" Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
I expected the "turned on" link to be linking to XKCD.
My only question is, when the smoke clears and we're all fine, will the doomsayers ever learn for the next time? Probably not. I'm sure next time they'll say
"this time, its different, the world is really going to end this time".
If I'm correct, no collisions have taken place yet.
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
The only question is, when they start colliding and/or accelerating the beams up toward the speed of light will this be the end of the world? As the XKCD comic says, they haven't really done anything interesting/risky just yet.
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Remember when Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 hit Jupiter? There were people saying (and being interviewed on the BBC no less) that pieces of Jupiter would break off and collide with Earth...
The claims of some regarding LHC are no less crazy. What distresses me is the level of coverage these nutbars have had on the news channels. I don't know about you, but I've had several people with non scientific backgrounds who've been scared by this 'news' turn to me for some real world information/reassurance.
When you are dealing with the level of brain dead reasoning that produces such spurious and inaccurate statements about things like the LHC, you can't hope to succeed. Honestly, even if you come up with good reasons, it automatically becomes a cover up to those people, thus excusing even wilder claims.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Am I the only one who's sick of every news story and every discussion about the LHC deteriorating into giving the "end of the world" bullshit even more time of day that it doesn't deserve?
This is one of the most important and ambitious scientific experiments that has been attempted in a long long time, but it seems that instead of taking the opportunity to get the general public inspired about science and discovery, the mainstream media has used it to spread unfounded doomsday rumours and anti-science propaganda. The fact that it's dominating even Slashdot discussions (albeit mostly in a joking way) is pretty tragic IMHO.
Prof Brian Cox said it best - "anyone who believes the LHC will destroy the world is a twat".
I've taken a huge interest in all this lately and have been spending hours on Wikipedia reading about bosons and leptons and so on.. it would be great to get some quality posts in this thread from some real hardcore particle physicists (come on, I know you're out there...)
By the way the story is 'the LHC is switched on'. It heralds the beginning of one of the most interesting science experiments of our age. The story is not really 'we are still alive' as that is no surprise to anyone who is not a retard.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I thought that the critics of this project were worried about the effects of COLLIDING the particles. Since that hasn't happened yet, this story is a whole lotta nuthin'.
Huh? You do realize that the purpose of building and turning on the LHC isn't to silence black-hole-apocalypse believers, right? The purpose of the LHC is to do new science. Successful containment and acceleration of the beams is an important milestone for this project. That's why this is news.
Presumably you will still think this story is "a whole lotta nuthin'" once collisions do happen, because those collisions will be at energies already probed by other accelerators. And even once LHC ramps up to full power, it will still be "a whole lotta nuthin'" because those energies already occur in nature (e.g. cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere).
I think it would be more accurate to say that the worries about black-hole-apocalypse are "a whole lotta nuthin'" whereas a successful activation of the LHC is amazing news for anyone interested in science.
Just remember - when they tested the first atomic bomb, they didn't know if it would ignite the atmosphere or not.
Fortunately, it didn't.
We (as a species) haven't done anything on the scale of the LHC before - and since the whole point of the device is to learn more about stuff we don't (relatively) know much about, there's bound to be WILD speculation about the potential results.
The loons get airplay because the loony airplay gets the ratings - and TV/radio is about ad revenue first and actual content second. ;p
This is why slashdot needs a -1 Time Cube moderation option.
Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to get those protons to near light speed? Think how much it'll take to get anything macroscopic moving at such speeds. Coupled with the fact a proton on its own is electrically charged while most atoms are electrically neutral - so using super conducting magnets won't work which is what the LHC makes a lot of use of.
It's completely and utterly impossible. There are so many things wrong with the concept, it's difficult to explain.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I remember seeing a program recently on the History Channel where they were explaining the science behind the LHC along with a tour of the facilities, the major experiments, interviews with the scientists, and (the interesting part for us Slashdot dwellers) the computer facilities. They mentioned that a tremendous amount of processing power with massive computer grids is required to analyze and filter the data from the detectors because there is not enough data storage presently in existence here on Earth to store more than one day's worth of collisions and detector data if they stored everything (i.e. they have to try and decide which collisions are the most interesting and only record those ones to the SAN). It seems that the more computing power they have available the more thorough they can be in their analysis of the data to fish out the interesting bits so I was wondering...How long might it be before we see a LHC@Home project like the Seti and protein folding where those of us who wish to can donate spare CPU cycles to analyze collision detector data can do so?
To make a "car" analogy, they're turned the ignition key and listened to the engine start up and turn over, and are congratulating themselves that the thing that they've just finished building seems to be working.
They've revved the engine with the gears in neutral. They haven't actually driven anywhere yet. That comes later.
Eric Baird