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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.
What you don't realize is that everything around the LHC is being converted into strange matter.
It started with the scientists, so noone has noticed anything different yet.
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.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
we're sliding down the gravitational tunnel of a very, very large event horizon... either way, I'm having cake!
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
"It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked"
Here'sproof.
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'.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Reading will only be possible in the Mysterious future!
Based on the images released thus far, I've come to the conclusion that a team of well-trained monkeys working exclusively in MS-Paint are close to modeling the stock market. In unrelated news, the head scientists at the LHC are planning their lavish retirement on Grand Cayman. More at 5.
You're all still here.
It's always nice to see complex engineering projects that work. It gives the impression that theory and reality are getting closer.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I think it's the most expensive electric train I ever heard of...
.....MS paint FTW!
Yes, it runs Linux.
Of course, it wouldn't have had been so ugly had they used Vista and DirectX 10. Or wait, perhaps LHC couldn't run Vista with all the bells and whistles.
Poor thing.
The cake is a lie...
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'.
Something better happen! I blew my life's savings on one of these getting ready for the alien hordes that'll come spilling through the gate they'll open!
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Because screens with colour used informatively, rather than making eye candy screens with flashy gradients and transparency, make the actual information easier to discern. This isn't some commercial app that has to sell to Mac enthusiasts, nor is it Photoshop.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Well, I'm breathing a sigh of relief to see they're running some sort of *NIX. I was worried a Windows BSOD would mean the end of the world :-).
Uhhh... one problem - they're not actually doing any collisions yet - so plenty of time for a blackhole to form and swallow us all (or for the blackhole to consume more funding ;) )
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
I'm really curious...
fvck b3ta!
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com
OMG! Wau!
When I was an undergraduate studying mathematics one of the most intriguing comments made by a professor was
Cutting edge mathematics takes about 50 years to find its way into physics, from there it takes about 25 years to find its way into engineering.
With the advent of the LHC and other amazing advances, like easy access to substantial computing power, do you think that this still holds true? By this, I mean do you think that life cycle times will shorten, or will they remain the same because even though these advances are being made, they are at higher, or very specific level, and as such, they will not be able to be developed into applications as quickly?
Thoughts?
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
It appears that turning on the LHC is transforming the world as we know it into the nightmare world of Linux on the Desktop...
'Damn, this collider-multiverse package doesn't fit well with my graphics card... I'll recompile the kernel changing some stuff.
...
OMG kernel black hole!'
I've always known this project was enormous, but I really didn't get it until I watched this special. They'd spend 5 minutes or show showing this massive facility with 30 foot high equipment - and this would be just like a little instrumentation room - just one of many. Truly amazing.
Working in "technology" - all the same-'old same-'ol computers we see day-in and day-out look like stupid adding machines next to the scale and complexity of the stuff there.
Speaking of which - it also went over their "computing grid". Their data storage farm was enormous. They also had ten thousand nodes to crunch the data!
BTW - What kind of machines did they have you ask? Some slick IBM 1u rackmount chassis? No - just a bunch of cheap, off-white, off-brand tower PCs sitting on rows and rows of shelves.
I'm sure they (did the smart thing) and did what Google did. High-end machines? No. Support Contracts? No.
If it dies? Pitch it and get a new one.
Well-written article on the Large Hadron Collider free of any scaremongering and vague references to "some questions have been raised"? Check. Bring in the crazies!
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
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...)
The mysterious future, or the past. I vote for the latter, 'cause that "control room" graphic looks like it was created on an Apple ][.
I'm really happy to hear that the LHC successfully tested without any major hitch. This huge machine will doubtlessly help us discover amazing things about our universe. On an unrelated note, my car kept veering to the east this morning on my way to work. Need to check those tires.
Does the 'large' in large hadron collider refer to the size of the hadrons or the size of the collider?
Huh? That's like saying "sparky stuff known as electricity" or "an attractive force known as magnetism". If you don't know what a proton is, is knowing it's a particle going to help you understand the article?
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ Check the site source :p
That picture is from smashing the beam into the collimator, not from passing the beam through ATLAS.
This is one of the final tests that you perform before passing the beam through - the result though is that millions of muons from the beam smash and deflect off the collimator, touching off all the different parts of the detectors. That's why you see so many energy deposits (green) throughout ATLAS.
When you're just circulating beams, the only thing you see are Cosmics and BeamHalo - any muons which collide with remaining gas particles upstream of the detector and basically circle right outside of the beam. Here's some pictures of CMS beam halo:
http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/cms-e-commentary.htm
Well, if everything you say is true, then it will be.
I am officially gone from
Has anyone seen my cat?
If disaster movies have taught us anything, it is that only when the party is over and everyone is a little tipsy, the problems will arise.
At that point, one lowly scientist (possible of Asian origin) will still be working in his office - despite regular calls of 'Hu! It's all fine, come out here and have some champagne'. He shouts out 'In a minute, I'm just checking something' Then to himself 'This is wrong. This is all wrong. Planck's constant shouldn't be varying like that.'
And then it all goes wrong.
Jeez, were you born yesterday!
Mark my words... come Friday, we'll all be eating black holes for breakfast with lashings of superheated strange milk.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Someone let me know when they start producing antimatter in useful quantities, I've got plans....
> Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't
Looks like one of those freeware DOS screensavers from the 90s.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Looks like these are (relatively) low-energy test runs for the time being
"During winter, the LHC will be shut down, allowing equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy. "
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Ok, but run where?
Now where's my towel?
That GUI looks to be implemented in Java - a quick google seems to validate that impression.
Java's licensing agreement, under the paragraph 3. Restrictions. states:
So, Java's no good for a nuclear facility, but it can operate a black hole generating facility just fine.
If you weren't concerned before ... now might be a good time.
Those who say the tiny lack holes would dissapear instantly, you are misinformed. They are solid mass. They can only grow, and anything that interacts with them will be sucked in
Mr. Hawking disagrees with you.
And even if he is wrong, my understanding is that particle collisions with the same energy levels happen on a routine basis as cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. That would seem to suggest that either these collisions lack the power to create black holes or Hawking's theory is correct and they evaporate pretty quickly.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How can they spend £2.6 billion and have control screens that look like a ZX spectrum?
The control screens are high-res, 32-million colors. The 16-bit colors you see are a side effect of the LHC Process. The effect started there and has been spreading outwards... they said not to worry, that we won't know the difference once it hits.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It's pretty obvious you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
In the first place, our current understanding is that black holes DO dissipate, through Hawking Radiation. Tiny black holes fade away almost instantaneously.
In the second place, tiny black holes are formed all the time. When interstellar dust hits the atmosphere, the resulting energy discharge can form tiny black holes, and fairly often. Most of them dissipate harmlessly.
Wait, there's more! Some black holes DO form when they hit the atmosphere and survive. Know what happens to them? Well, first consider how small a chunk of mass dense enough to be considered a black hole has to be when it's composed of the equivalent of a few protons. We are talking sub-electron size here. These black holes sink to the center of the Earth, but are so small they don't interact with any atoms on the way down. They sit at the center of the Earth, absorbing a new particle every few thousand years.
Events with the power of the LHC happen all the time at the edges of the atmosphere, and if they really had a reasonable capacity to cause a catastrophic event, it would have happened naturally many times over already.
That said, the night before collisions start, I'm having an End of the Universe party.
> And we're all still alive too!
I'm not, you insensitive clod!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Yeah, but it can still be considered "a" success of sorts. According to this short article http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14699 the LHC has worked better than expected so far. It can be safely assumed that it is not a trivial task for everything to work perfectly on the 27km track cooled to 1.9K.
Cern has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions, but these are expected to happen before the machine shuts down for winter.
Perhaps somebody with a good grasp of complex topics such as magnets and electricity can explain to me: why does a 27km long underground tunnel need to shut down for the winter?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Forget your headcrabs, I got flying sharks over here!
I believe this is the SCADA software that is shown in the screen shot for the detector. Can someone please confirm? Atlas
It appears that turning on the LHC is transforming the world as we know it into the nightmare world of Linux on the Desktop...
If that were true they would of called it Hardy Hadron.
This has also a good RSS feed, in case you won't notice updates immediately. http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
slashwhat?
Picture makes sense to me. It was a success thanks to KDE
MOD THE CHILD UP!
My hadron weighs a ton.
... What?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"It worked! Engineers activated the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and it worked! Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring (and we're all still alive too!)."
Stupid passive voice.
[/nitpick]
Check out the bizarre comments on BBC:
http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=5325&edition=2&ttl=20080910154235
Seems people think this is a waste of money and an affront to the invisible pink unicorn.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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
I've read that it will be some time before they test anything with enough energy that they might create the "mini black holes" everyone is worried about, that it might be a couple of years?
However, when they DO do it, if the black holes do not dissipate and immediately head for the center of the planet and proceed to grow and kill all of us, does that mean Hawking owes everyone in the world a subscription to Penthouse? Sweet.
I like music
Today is the day I've been waiting for! I can't believe all of the evangelical idiots who are trying to stop the LHC with lawsuits.
But the collision opened up a parallel universe where we DIDN'T die due to a black hole, so we're living in that one now.
I think they're pictures of the MCP from Tron.
...living in a black hole. Doesn't seem all that different.
The problem here -- and you're a prime example -- is that most people have no idea what a black hole really is, and they're scared of it.
As others point out, these black holes form all the time in nature. And black holes do dissipate. Most people only know black holes as the crazy huge things that eat light and stars and are "gateways to other dimensions". So, when they see the headline, "Large Hadron Collider Will Create Black Holes" they panic and try to stop it from happening.
It's just another example of the media feeding off of the public's ignorance and willingness to read an eye-catching headline.
rm -rf
From the BBC news website
"Full beam ahead
Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring.
Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems.
Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, said: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets."
If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.
Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.
The culprits - who were drinking a particular brand that advertising once claimed would "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach" - were never found. "
The "beer that refreshed the parts..." was an advertising slogan for Heiniken
The article ends:
> Engineers celebrated the success with champagne,
> but a certain brand of beer was not on the menu.
Now I may just be some dumb American, but I can't figure out which brand they are talking about.
Odd. My quantum calculations seem to show that the universe has only been existance for about 8 hours.
...well I was going to ask, but the picture from the control room looks like Gnome to me. At least they won't have to worry about any BSOD while the black holes gobble them up!!!
After all, we're mostly harmless.
But don't forget your towel... just in case.
Cake or death?
Cake please.
Sorry, we're all out of cake. We didn't expect to have such a run on it.
Ok, I'll have the chicken then.
Well... Ok. Good thing we're the Church of England.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
All you guys posting "SEE WE DIDN'T DIE" are clueless. This was just test. They haven't actually fired it at full power, and they haven't actually collided anything yet. They just ran it at partial power, in each direction, one at a time. The end of world will come when they actually collide particles from opposite directions at full power. This wont happen for months, so get off the I told you so bandwagon AND READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE. Then and only then can you say we didn't die, but by then the black hole will kill us all or the stragelets will turn us into zombies and the apocalypse will be upon us.
It's not just you! I was totally reminded of that game.
Have a look: :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
he he
*ahem* These are images from design specs that were recently obtained by our spies. As you can see on the upper right image, there is clearly a small trench leading to an exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor core. A proton torpedo launched at exactly the right time could travel through the exhaust shaft to the reactor core and set off a chain reaction.
Happy to help!
"Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me. "
I can draw with MS Paint too you know!
I think historically, often early engineering solutions are adhoc and based on elementary math and physics. As the field matures, it taps into cutting edge physics and mathematics for furthur refinement. the limiting factors of adoption of refinements are often economic not technical. That's why they take so long, not because there are generally techical limitations.
For example, humans engineered bridges long before finite element solvers and vibrational modes were generally known and accounted for in the design. Even computers (e.g., mechanical or relay computers) were engineered before the physics behind transistors were discovered. Once the physics and mathematics were discovered, the real limitations behind the application of these refinements were economic velocity.
If anything has sped up in our world is the application of large scale economic leverage to problem. In the pre-modern world, finding large markets and mustering the capital to realize a technical advance was career in itself (think about the early explorers visiting kings and queens to get financial support to sail their boat to try and find the "passage-to-india"). The want was not the physics or math (the navigation technology and the boats were all available for years), but raising the financial backing was hard. Even in the so called industrial age, capital was still quite centralized to big corporations and governments and international markets were not very well developed often due to massive tariffs and other trade barriers.
Now with modern investment markets and international trading, people with good ideas (and some people that don't have good ideas), have unprecedented backing of capital and available markets to press forward with just about any application that is feasible. If it's true that the barriers to adoption of cutting edge stuff from math or physics are really only limited by economic factors (which may be as long as before if the technology is expensive and the market demand isn't present), the time should be shorter. It's not because the advances are a high level that they will take a long time to be developed, it's because they don't have any market or require excessive capital for the available market that they will have problems being adopted.
For example, if some cutting edge math or physics discovery resulted in a battery that was exponentially better (e.g., cheaper/ligher), than today, I'd bet it would be in an electric car and/or ipod in a matter of a few years as there would be massive investment made in that area to develop the engineering required. However, if we had a way to make $5billion microscopic black holes that nobody wanted, that would take quite a while to be available at radio-shack as a party favor or gag gift...
From wikipedia:
Cosmic rays can have energies of over 10^20 eV, far higher than the 10^12 to 10^13 eV that man-made particle accelerators can produce.
The LHC will merely achieve energies of of 7*12^eV. Therefore it's no big deal. So if it is going to make mini black holes, Higgs bosons, or whatever kind of doomsday particle, they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere all the time.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Here's the live webcast. There was a video earlier of the computer/network hardware used, pretty nifty.
In related news, towel sales #s are on an upward trend.
In about two weeks, they'll find out about the microscopic rift that opened in spacetime. A wormhole. To hell! The rift will grow slowly, until in about a month, it'll be large enough to drive a Mack truck through. There will be a coverup, but the world will find out very soon when demons and monsters start spewing out of it and attacking people, who will themselves change into similar demons and monsters. Within several months, the entire population of the Earth will be changed into monsters from hell! By then, the entire planet will be sucked directly into the blazes of hell and damnation itself. Meh. The post I wrote yesterday was much funnier.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
All your Muons are belong to us!
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
They haven't fired the beams at each other yet...
These black holes sink to the center of the Earth, but are so small they don't interact with any atoms on the way down. They sit at the center of the Earth, absorbing a new particle every few thousand years.
They wouldn't sink to the earth's centre; they would either escape earth's gravity or simply fall into some sort of orbit. With such a small size as to have no significant interaction with the matter they pass, they would experience no deceleration, but then they wouldn't be too dangerous either. If these hypothetical black holes actually do exist, you could still probably have several million of them – perhaps even billions – pass directly through your body without consuming enough atoms to be noticed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Well, here's partially why: because a lot (most?) news outfits are all about journalistic impartiality. Which is a good thing... until you realize that their definition of it is slightly more perverse than yours.
When covering most subjects the idea of impartiality is to present two opposite points of view, without taking sides. Same as impartiality in politics would mean presenting the Democrat and Republican view about any issue, without telling you that one is good and the other is evil. Whether it's about some debatable budget issue or torture and human rights violations, they're not going to tell you which side to take. (Partisan newspapers will still do that, but non-aligned newspapers generally avoid blatantly telling you which side is right. They might tell you one is wrong when it's about China, or serves as willy-waving... err... flag-waving against some foreign nation, but not when it's about domestic politics.)
Unfortunately science isn't politics. But it's treated as such by the media anyway. It's presented as if it is mostly just a matter of opinion, and largely some controversy where there is no objective right and wrong and where everyone's guess is just as good.
At any rate, they _need_ to have two sides of the issue, even if one is proven bogus. If they run a column about, say, global warming, they have to have a side which says "we're doomed" and one side which says "no, it's not even happening." If someone took upon themselves to run a column about gravity, they would _have_ to also have one or two guys (with a degree in gardening, bought from a diploma mill in East Bumfuckistan which also made a cat and two dogs Ph.D.) saying something like, "nah, that's all wrong, there is no gravity, we're just on the inside of a rotating sphere!" And if they run a column where some astrophysicist says something like, "nah, don't be silly, Jupiter is just a giant gas ball, if anyone blew a 'chunk' of hydrogen out of it, it would just dissipate in space", they _have_ to present the opposite point of view too. Even if they have to scratch the bottom of the proverbial barrel for someone who'll go, "no! that's wrong!! it'll shatter Jupiter to pieces and rain fiery asteroid deat upon us all!!!"
And of course they can only present that as perfectly equal and no better or worse than the scientists. Because telling you that one of them is bogus, or that he doesn't have the qualifications or peer-reviewed work, would violate that impartiality.
Additionally that works in reverse too. The media thrives on a good controversy, so the pairing can (and usually is) initiated from the other end. Some nutjob makes some ridiculous claim, the press pairs him with some real scientist saying, "that's bull", as perfect equals, and the "impartial" story is complete.
So, in a nutshell, that's how such nutjobs get disproportionately more coverage than they deserve. Because the press needs them to meet its own fucked-up definition of "impartiality".
Unfortunately, that may be doing us all more harm than the Inquisition and Counter-Enlightenment combined. We have a generation or two already who grew up on a distorted view where everything is a controversy, and any opinion about science is equal to all other opinions. We have people who believe that Newton's laws of mechanics would be different if they were written by, say, a woman. Because that's how much of a matter of only personal opinion they see science. We have PR hacks and the PHBs or lobbyists who employ them, who don't even understand the damage they're doing. They're, after all, just spreading their own opinion about science, which they've been taught that is just another opinion and no less valuable than that of Einstein. Etc.
And there seems to be no end in sight. I'm guessing it will eventually bite us all in the arse worse than we think.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I woke up this morning and all of my spoons were sporks! ...and I don't even want to discuss the strange state of my feline companion.
is that they made a singular discovery, as opposed as they discovered a singularity.
..... is .... 42!
No sig today...
The universe was all destroyed in one go.
But it came back in one go - I can tell by looking, you know.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
This was only a test to see if the beam could be generated in one way. Then they have to generate the beam in an another. Then they will do the collisions. Then we can relax and hope the world doesn't end.
I mean seriously, if a bunch of SUVs can threaten the delicate nature of life on earth, then is it so unreasonable to think that playing with the very fundamental forces that bind the universe together might not have some risk? Sure, there may be a 99.999% chance that nothing will go wrong. But, if it does, then aren't we all screwed?
This is my sig.
There's a dark area in the corner of my office this morning. It wasn't there yesterday. I dropped a pencil and it was sucked into it. How long will this last?
.
They could still be proven to be right. This "test" was simply to see if they could get a proton stream to travel in a circle around the facility. In a week or two, they are going to test it going the other direction. It will still be a month or two before they actually test having the two streams collide, and it is only at that point that you run the risk of micro black holes. And actual large scale scientific experiments aren't going to start until early next year. So the doomsayers could still be right, and this test in itself doesn't disprove their claims. We will have to wait on that.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
in the screenshot!
Check out my cross-platform apps
Are they running KDE 3? I thought they were using top of the line software!! We're all going to die!!!!!!
Ryan
Are we? How can you be sure? Get the physicists on it ASAP!
Game... blouses.
I was looking at the comments at CNN, and the best comment I saw was: "How dare those scientists spend $8 billion on this project, just to prove that God doesn't exist!"
...
If there were an experiment that could prove the existence or nonexistence of god, it'd be worth $8 TRILLION! Just think:
a) How much money is spent on religon or science every year?
b) How much revenue is lost by people sitting in church/laboratories every day?
c) How much money could be made by turning the Vatican/CERN into an amusement park/MegaChurch?
We need to figure out this experiment. I think it involves firing angels at the head of a pin at a large percentage of the speed of light.
I'm not sure how you collimate faith, but if we can solve that problem, we can do this!
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.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
according to cern, they begin today
They're using their grammar skills there.
Yes, it is running and the world is still here. But I've had this headache for the last 3 hours... :)
I've been standing beside the freeway all morning, holding my towel, thumb extended, expecting the worst. Now I just look silly...
Until it can create a blackhole and sucks the whole Earth in, I won't consider it as a real success.
Let's save your champagne and celebrate only after that.
LHC switches on. Alien species comes to steal a few rednecks and some cattle.
They are faced with a 404 Planet Not Found.
The planet you are looking for has been moved, does not exist, or blew itself and the universe up. Please contact your galactic admin.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Now I'm stuck in this alternative reality where George W. Bush is President?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Pfft. Screw that. I've got my steel-toed boots ready to give Death a punt in the old bean-bag and run.
"Just because every person who has ever said this in the history of the world has been wrong, doesn't mean you should let that influence your perceptions or anything."
After all, petting that kitten COULD cause Xa'gnoth the Destroyer Of Worlds to believe you have desecrated his holy symbol, thus causing him to order the Merciless Legions of Xart'thudin to vaporize the Milky Way galaxy in a fit of pique.
I take that back -- comparing the LHC to Xa'gnoth is likely to insult him further, as the notion that His Bleak Countenance is only as likely to cause global destruction as a billion-dollar high school science fair project would probably grate on him.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Scientists at the LHC made a funny video to explain what the do there...
they don't talk about black holes and other things, but it should be useful (and funny) for those who do not know what lhc is about...
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
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.
Well, I'm at CERN right now and everyth
The world can only end once. That it didn't this time says nothing about naysayers being right or wrong in the long term. If it ends in cataclysm, there will be nobody left to say "but they were right!". But they would be. And everyone would die thinking they were insane. So, that the world did not end isn't really conclusive that doomsayers are wrong. They could have just as easily been right, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Ummm... "Most of them"? Did I miss something, like when I came back from vacation last summer and everybody but me knew Manny Ramirez had been traded?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's strange how even the most ordinary every day things like obliterating a planet are somehow amazing to Fry.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Ditto. The beam is on, but there are no countercirculating particles yet so no super-duper-high-energy physics yet. We still need to wait a few weeks for that (and the world to end). I keep telling all females that we need a big orgy before the world ends...
Um...I think Hanna Montana is totally kewl. She rocks. Um, like. What were we talking about?
Off course we're alive, they didn't start colliding stuff. We'll talk after that.. *evil laugh*
The Atlas guys uses KDE, yay!
Here's an interesting question - suppose you really believed that scientists would soon conduct a slightly dangerous experiment but were unable to stop it, how would you try to save humanity?
Would you send out probe(s) with a genetic blueprints and stem cells?
Would you broadcast the whole DNA and assisting information to Alpha Centauri and a lot of other star systems(think Sil the other way around)?
Would you take the DNA of gamers up to the ISS?
Your suggestion?
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
everything.pl > /dev/null
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
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?
I was wondering....
Suppose, a tiny black whole is created. And suppose Hawking-radiation does not happen to exists (as far as i know, it has never been confirmed to exist yet), so the black hole will not evaporate itself into this radiation... how dangerous is such a black hole?
The energies that are used and produced are extreme to our senses, however I think they are still nothing compared to the forces and energies found in the galactical black holes.
So, how quick will it grow? Will it be possible to suck up the earth in a matter of minutes, or will it take millions of years?
In the latter case, I think it will just sink to the center of gravity of the earth. There it may first wobble about around the CoG, and (later) have some growing impact on the rotation of the earth as it gets bigger.
(Could it be possible we already have a tiny black hole down in the center, due to collisions from radition from outer space, which helps keeping the earth spinning?)
What do you think?
Something created the universe out of nothing. Which suggests space itself may be damaged by certain events, possibly creating another universe inflating at the speed of the Big Bang.
Now that'd be something.
A non-evaporating black hole would merely swallow the Earth over a matter of days or weeks. Then the moon would continue to orbit a black hole with the Earth's mass, but no more ocean tides sapping its orbital energy, and the rest of the solar system wouldn't notice all that much.
It would drastically reduce the probability of a collision with a planet-killer asteriod, though. So we got that going for us.
I would hate to be the guy that has to walk the ring looking for damage/sabotage.
Although.. It would make for a pretty cool jogging track. The exceptionally fit could brag about how many "pi"s they've done during the off-time.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You know if these "naysayers" and doomsday fanatics had there way then we would not have half of the tech that we and them rely on, on a daily basis. With the Atom bomb everyone thought we would kill ourselves but out of the deadlist WMD every made came a cheap reliable source of fuel. I say push these test to the limit who knows what the possibilites are. Who knows because of the experiments done today we could have a "startrek" future. The bigger the risk the better the payout. So if we destroy our planet so what we're doing it know in other ways. why should this be any diffrent.
When you do an experiment that creates black holes, it is prudent to do a risk analysis. That very high energy cosmic rays hits earth and we are still ok is not a sufficient analysis of the problem. That ern did de diligence and did a lot of risk analysis on exactly this as well as other failure modes was the only prudent choice.
To brush away any critics as doomsayers is on the same level as the most irrational of the doomsayers.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I don't know about you all, but when I looked at the picture of the control room, I incorrectly through the banner ad was for a Fart Button was part of the picture. This of course struck me as funny as I was wondering why would the scientists at the LHC need a Fart Button?
Because screens with colour used informatively, rather than making eye candy screens with flashy gradients and transparency, make the actual information easier to discern. This isn't some commercial app that has to sell to Mac enthusiasts, nor is it Photoshop.
Actually these are multi color graphs Ross Perot made while on Acid for this years presidential election.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I'm afraid that a billion LHCs would be close to if not larger than the size of the earth itself. Somewhat beyond our current engineering capabilities.
Which is not to mention that a probe of meaningful size would be substantially more than billions of times as large as the atom packs they accelerate in this thing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I can't believe someone went to all that effort of making a website like that, and didn't even provide an RSS feed.
throw new NoSignatureException();
What do you mean all the cake is gone?
fairy cake.. yeah we had to use it for the LHC.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Greg Egan's Incandescence universe has relativistic femtometer-sized robotic probes called "strong bullets" you can shoot off somewhere to perform observations:
A new generation of observatories had been designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on strong bullets: specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories.
Of course, Incandescence is based on a trans-galactic meta-civilization that's existed for hundreds of millions of years, not on barely risen apes who can't even make a decent portable telephone.
Like hell we won't! We can finally stop buying these fancy-schmancy $600 video cards. About damn time, too. Also, the color "eggshell" will no longer be available for interior design.
"This is why slashdot needs a -1 Time Cube moderation option."
oh man, I would mod you up for that statement alone.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
Can someone clarify if Hawkings radiation is what the parents suggests or what this wikipedia article suggests?
Is it the breakdown of a black hole or merely pairs of particles being spontaneously generated on the event horizon and unable to recombine?
If you have seen Ghost Busters, you will know that is a Very Bad Idea.
All this was was an initial test, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the collider. Nothing was actually collided.
"Here is a picture from the control room"
I think I used to play that game on Atari!
if a black hole was to be made, it would need mass first, so it can become a very powerful gravitational force. to get mass itll need to suck in everything at a very small force, so the first thing it would suck in would be air, then if it gets stronger, a little dust, and eventually leading onto the whole earth. dont worry if a black hole is made we will have at least a day unless the scientists somehow seal it from the outside world.
a second scenario which might arrise is a nuclear explosion. i know protons arnt responcible for these, but we are hitting these protons at the speed of light! protons have the same charge, which means its like trying to hit north and north of a magnet together. its not suppost to happen.
so they are the 2 worst scenarios, the end of the world or the end of france. i'd choose france lol.
but face it people the threat level is extremely
low. but there is that element of uncertanty which leads of theories like this.
Maybe when the LHC was turned on, it did annihilate Earth and the universe; but just before doing so, it spawned this alternate reality we woke up in.
Or maybe it did create a blackhole larger than what they expected, like pea-sized, with a basketball-sized event horizon, and they're just doing a damn good job of keeping it under wraps.
Either scenario makes sense if you think about it. I mean, how embarrassing would that be? Imagine that press conference: "On behalf of all the world's scientist, I'd just like to go record as saying 'Whoops, our bad.'"
Support the FairTax
I'm not saying it's going to kill us, but all they did this morning was turn it on and do a comparatively slow test run to what they'll be doing at the end of next month, and then constantly over and over again for years nonstop.
....vhen it does start destroying ze earth and you visit ze vebsite and see 'YES'. Vho's laughing then, eh?, vho's laughing then !
Go to the site and paste this into the address bar:
javascript:var t=setTimeout("document.getElementsByTagName('span')[0].innerHTML='YES';",Math.random()*5000+5000);void(0);
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Suddenly I find myself needing to know the plural of "apocalypse."
--Angel
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Again, supposing it's not radiated away in a flash, could a charge black hole interact in some way? Or does having photon being stuck inside keep them for interacting through anything but gravity?
The picture is obvious - it's the wormhole that the LHC opened to the Atlantis base in the Pegasus galaxy. It even says so right on the window frame!
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
The IEDAB is part of the How To Destroy The Earth web site, which is hilarious and very much worth a read.
So you mean Linux has the potential to end more than just the Microsoft World? :P
I want this account deleted.
Uhhh... one problem - they're not actually doing any collisions yet - so plenty of time for a blackhole to form and swallow us all (or for the blackhole to consume more funding ;) )
How exactly do they think that high speed collisions are going to cause black holes? Do they think that slamming two particles together fast enough will cause them to be close enough together to have a near infinite density required for light to not be able to escape? I would think you would need a lot more speed and a lot more mass, but then I am just a layman. I don't have access to the technical resources that crackpots do.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If it was to end the World it wouldn't be until they actually started colliding and ramped the power up.
I wouldn't be partying yet sending the beams round one way wasn't anyones worry.
So far they are just testing proton beam luminosity. Doomsday is in six weeks.
( Is it just me or does this thing have too much in common with a death star? )
Hardy Hardon?
Oh, never mind.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
For a thought-provoking science fiction story set at the Large Hadron Collider, read Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer.
-- Hot Wasabi over & out --
Geeky caucasian rappers! http://www.metro.co.uk/media/viral.html?in_page_id=6&in_mediaext_item_id=174767
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Have people become so excited over something actually interesting that they've forgotten to spam the discussion with old memes? I ask because "does it run linux" could actually be relevant -- That screenshot looks like KDE; now I wonder what the rest of their software stack is like...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
A better comparison would be trying to explain colors to a blind person
I'll take a stab at that. I'd say color is roughly analogous to pitch in sound. It's more of a qualitative analysis gradient type difference. Loss of color vision would be like hearing the world in speak-and-spell monotone. Annoying, but ultimately not a terribly critical difference.
Continuing the comparison of audio to visual, brightness is akin to volume, and just like with volume, a low brightness level makes it very difficult to discern details. Ability to discern color also fades out when the brightness does.
Also, just like with pitch, certain colors "carry" better than others. Indeed, just like sound, it's the higher frequency colors that are more discernable over long distance.
Knowledge != Intelligence
Bah. The apocalypse was announced today in national news papers and many tv news programs today. Here in Holland anyway, and I'm sure all over the western(!) world.
What a stupid random media hype. There is no news at all. This is not the big moment of the LHC.
No collisions have taken place today and none will until mid October, when the first collision is scheduled.
Typical of the journalism of today, this is pure sensationalism. Any journalist that had bothered to do one femtosecond of research should at least know that the world is not going to end today and perhaps think about doing a piece a month from now, on how the world has not ended, and science and common sense have triumphed again.
assignment != equality != identity
I've heard both "the LHC will create conditions not seen since the Big Bang" and "cosmic rays, of more intense energy than generated by the LHC, bombard the earth every day..."
Is there a subtlety here that I'm missing? Does the LHC create an environment not seen since the Big Bang but consisting of energies less intense than cosmic rays?
It seems like one quote was kept since funding request days and the latter generated for allaying the doomsayers.
-USR1
Doomslayer will always be there. I wonÂt call it a victory yet. The "real" test is still coming. They just turned it on, and itÂs working half the capacity to the one in the USA (0.5 ThV). Protons still need to collide, for now they are just going in circles around the ring. Keep reading the news about LHC.
And... maybe it will?
I'm not a doomsayer, but a new threat is, well, new. Maybe the space elevator or the wormhole generator WILL kill us where the particle accelerator failed. We just have to calculate the risks again and maybe try it.
I'm just sayin'.
Close. When a machine dies at Google, they just let it rot. It's cheaper than replacing it. (Or so I've heard.)
In a related vein, anyone know if there's a BOINC project for the LHC? I know there was one for the simulations...
Folks, do not worry about the LHC creating black holes, because Einstein himself argued against black holes, and I second that, based on my concept of the limitations on the origin of the gravitational force. Nobody, to date understand what gravity is, yes, not even Newton and Einstein. All what Newton and Einstein gave us is this brilliant interpretation of the dynamics of matter in space time, they do not tell us anything about the origin of gravity itself. So, not knowing the very properties of the nature of the gravitational force itself, how can scientists extrapolate Newtonâ(TM)s and Einsteinâ(TM)s equations to predict black holes? What if I say that the gravitational force is limited, that is it cannot apply a force more than a certain amount? Then there is no way that a black hole singularity can be formulated. Then there is the hope that the LHC might discover the so far speculative Dark Matter particles. Here again the scientists have taken the easy way out to explain an observed strange behavior of some stars, by speculating the existence of invisible and unobservable real matter, based on to satisfy Newtonâ(TM)s laws. The LHC will provide a null result for dark matter, because, I say there is an entirely different way to modify Newtonâ(TM)s gravity to account for the strange behavior of the stars, without Dark Matter. Finally, the LHC is hoped to find the Higgâ(TM)s particle, which is supposed to define matter mass. Mass is an inherent property of matter, it cannot be given to, by a hypothetical Higgâ(TM)s field. I predict a null result, because there is another intrinsic way for mass less particles to acquire mass internally. Tissa Perera
The way I understand it is the blackholes exist because the mass is sufficient to have an escape velocity exceeding the speed of light due to relivitistic effects like the Lorenz transformations. It interesting to note that these transformations are frame dependent and velocity dependent so if the blackholes really exist, they will only be blackholes along the axis of travel and will not be blackholes perpendicular to the axis of travel. Also as the blackholes will be colliding with other particles that are relatively stationary and will loose kenetic energy until eventually they will lose enough velocity and relativistic mass to cease being at blackhole at all; that should be quite an interesting event!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This means I've touched myself more times than there are stars in the sky! THIS is the price of marriage!
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Argument ad difficult explanation...um.
Nit picking here... But, don't you mean 16 colors (or 4-bit color?) 16-bit color is 65,536 possibilities. :)
Today, the first tests were conducted of the LHC's ability to accelerate protons. In other news, a timing error with Google's news aggregator caused several hundred million dollars worth of United Airlines market cap to evaporate overnight.
If you explained to an average idiot that the idea of HLC is to get one particle going at near the speed of light, and then get another going at the same speed so they smashed into each reproducing the "big bang", and then pretended to just realize that their desk lamp is spitting out photons at the speed of light, and so were the overhead lights...
At least 30% of them would dive under their desks if you pointed their lamp at the ceiling.
People are so stupid. Everyone knows ordinary desks can't protect you from the Big Bang. Only the Rex Devious Big-Bang Resistant Desk System can! Available now for 1/2 off it's $1,400 retail price for a very, very limited time. Act now and receive our patented "Black Hole Child Safety Screen" absolutely free!
And of course, if should you become separated into matter and anti-matter, your child become reduced to a single point of infinite density, or you are unsatisfied with your new Desk System in anyway - we offer a 100% money back guarantee! That's how sure we are you'll be perfectly safe no matter *what* direction you point your desk lamp in. Act Now... before that light in the office mini-fridge goes on!
wait, everyone, listen to me, the voice of reason. All you need to do( providing you do this at the appropriate "black hole time" i like to call it) is look up and you will see the sky turn very dark and very ... VERY black hole like.
I rest my case
You're making a huge assumption here...
From my understanding, energy cannot be created nor destroyed in a closed system (such as the universe.) While it's tempting to believe that everything has a beginning and an end, it's more realistic to see that matter and energy simply change forms. For example, a baby isn't created out of nothing... He or she is formed from food consumed by the mother. Likewise, he or she doesn't cease to exist when dead... The person simply changes form back into the kind of dirt that grew the food he or she was formed from.
So, saying that the universe created really is inconsistent with everything we've observed. It's more probable that the universe always has existed, and always will exist... Although perhaps not in it's present form.
My favorite theory is that the universe will eventually re-compress to form another big bang, and that it's destined to forever continue forming, spawning life, and collapsing.
I cite Atheist Universe by David Mills for a lot of this information.
It looks like Unix - I know this!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
... or the black holes continue at the initial speed of the particles and pass through the earth and out of the solar system at nearly the speed of light before they pick up any substantial mass.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The whole basis of this "experiment" is to "re-create" the big bang. Countless dollars (I would like to see the bill on this damn thing), time, effort, went into this ordeal...
But why fack 330 feet underground??? What the F? So if they were expecting to "re-create" the big bang... what makes under the Earths soil and prime spot for oh say... another planet! I think with all the money they blow on space exploration, and the fact that we already have a few planets roaming the stars. Space would have been a more ideal test bed.
Last thing we need is a nice GROWING lump on the surface of our little earth, causing a wobble effect in the rotation. Allowing manufactures to find ways of selling "No Fall Down Boots".
Call me crazy...
I'll take your money! I'll put up $100 to your $2000 that the world DOES get sucked into a black hole. You may ask for your payment, should I lose, right after the Big Rip unless the Big Crunch comes first. Should the Big Crunch come first, you owe me.
Citations:
And no cheezy trying to squirm out of it by claiming the definition of the earth was to a more or less big single rock not a bunch of shredded atoms, our bet is on the fate of the majority of the sum of energy and matter that make up said big rock.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Is the LHC going to prove/disprove the validity of string theory?
I've read that string theory can't really be tested with our current technology and may never be proven to be right or wrong. As opposed to Einstein's theory of relativity, which was proven in an experiment in 1919, when light bent around a star was measured by Eddington--and made Einstein famous.
In fact I read an article recently that said string theory was basically leading physics to a dead end. The author said physicists were lost in this field and coming up with new theories and inventions for the sake of making their equations turn out correctly.
I have good reason.
This is a religious thing to prove big bang. Big bang is crappy theory that has absolutely no proof and there are evidence already to disprove it. Big voids and bubbles inside the galactic distribution is one....The cosmic background actually disprove big bang...
You see, if the universe was created from a point...there has to be a center..and there has to be a massive black hole due to conservation of momentum and energy...
Yet we see none...but a pretty evenly distributed microwave background...
Nevertheless, we have evidence here on this planet...to prove that big bang is a big flap.
First...take out your periodic table...do you see the bigger the atom, the more unstable it is?
How come those smart scientists could not explain why it is so?
If the bigger the atom, the more unstable it is...and the more energy it takes to bind them...what can possibly bind the damn universe into one point? Infinite energy?
Yes, if the universe is to start from a point, it has to have infinite energy.
If the universe started with infinite energy, then every point of the universe, no matter how much it has expanded, has to have infinite energy.
Infinity divided by anything still infinite...except by infinite...then it become undefined...
Do you see undefined amount of energy in your bedroom?
COME ON...GIVE ME A BREAK! THIS IS CONVERTING SCIENCE AND LOGIC INTO A RELIGION!
Science does not survive on faith. It survives on logical deduction and experimental results!
CERN will see some bigger particles may be...for a tiny click of time...say...10 to the power of -15 second....
But don't even think about the 10 to -31 second that I talked about last year. You ain't gonna see that....Nothing in the world can detect that....
It is ok to make some freaking unstable particles...but it is a freaking waste of time and resources. You might as well devote all the resources to figure out why the galactic distribution has voids...and build a better telescope to look further...and then prove that time is not a constant thing...
The technologies leading to space traveling do not lie in a colossal particle collider...it lies in the photons....
The space time relationship has everything to do with gravity and the dark matter...the ether...
Gee...I am glad we have not waste money to build a bigger donut.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
It's pretty obvious you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
In the first place, our current understanding is that black holes DO dissipate, through Hawking Radiation.
That's only a theoretical prediction. It has never ever been proved experimentally.
When interstellar dust hits the atmosphere,the resulting energy discharge can form tiny black holes, and fairly often.
Talking about being misinformed. Interstellar dust is FAR from energetic enough. Not even VHE or UHE cosmic rays produce black holes. There's no experimental evidence what so ever for your claim.
Sorry to say this, but it seems you need to revisit some basic physics.
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html At least the webcams give us something more.... visually amusing.
No.
Now i understand that some ppl are hell bent on saving humanity, but none of these methods benefit anyone.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Particle Physicist Claire was definitely part of the turning-on process for me. Whoever her husband is must be pretty lucky to have her, when she's not busy at the lab, that is!
I know this is incredibly nitpicky of me, but I would like to point out an interesting aspect of this statement:
Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Even at the supposedly pokey speed of .98 c, the proton stream is whizzing around that thing almost 11000 times per second. That's one complete circuit every 92 microseconds, give or take. The fastest transmission time I could find for a neural synapse was 200 microseconds. By the time their brains had processed "woo," it had probably already made several thousand more loops.
Those protons probably got bored waiting for the engineers to say something. They were all down at the pub getting swizzled before the crew even realized it had worked.
It is marvelously self contained. If there were some deviance we would have seen quite a different outcome at least initally. Mind you the negative outcome was theoretical - however we're still here. BTW such a small rift or anomaly in our space (local) would likely have done nothing more than inconvenience us. As our globe turns the rift would not turn with it but stay stationary.. (it has no mass and can not respect our laws of physics) and so at the speed of that rotation it would be beyond its birthplace. Take a deep breath. (at least its a good thought)
You do realise that the vast mojority of the number crunching that will be done on the collected data will not be done on site? Those ten thousand nodes are mostly for data storage, not number crunching.
of course it works!! and so? AWAKE FOR LIFE SAKE!!! Do you realise how SERIOUS this "experiment" is?? NOT ONLY AT THE EXPENSE OF $5.9 billion that otherwise could be used in many healing ways to our planet as it is, it has the chance to GO WRONG..if it does, the consequences are unfathomable. This should have been aknowledge to everyone as an even more important issue than to choose a US President! THIS ISSUE concern us all as humanity. It is unbelievable how the media highlights what it pleases and hide important issues like this making it look INSIGNIFICANT?!! how powerles and HOPELESS and small I feel not being able to STOP such NERD ambition to know it ALL!!!! WE DON'T have to know it all!!!! we need a healthy planet to live...some are actually enjoying it you know?? THE LHC seems to coincide with the 2012 prophecy's as results for what they are doing now won't be experienced for 4 years... This is an absolute MISUSE of POWER...How IDIOTIC Man can be?
Bonus points if you can identify the UNIX window manager running from the screenshot window decorations. KDE? Solaris?
10^14th bonus points if you are the FOSS coder who wrote the window decoration theme which is now used to control the planet's most powerful instrument of destruction.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
The Science News website has an image from the control center showing that the first proton beam went all the way around the tunnel.
to near light speed in an SUV supercollider. The physics would be awesome and it would make a great commercial.
This is my sig.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26641652/ We're not *all* still alive. There is that Indian girl who committed suicide because of fear of doomsday from the LHC.
I had typed a rather long reply about the energy requirements (which would be well into the petajoule range by my estimates), and was working on the reasons why it wouldn't work in terms of chemistry and quantum physics, but decided that the original post was simply not worth the time to try to correct; to try to substitute a slashdot post for a high school education would be an exercise in futility.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The poster is suffering from a similar confusion.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I was making a joke.
Hawking radiation is thought to be emitted by all black holes. They will slowly evaporate by this process if nothing adds mass to them (such as infalling matter and radiation). The pairs-of-virtual-particles description is a loose description of the mechanism by which it happens. Smaller black holes emit Hawking radiation at a greater rate.
PROTONS.
In this case, grammar nazis are perfectly welcome, especially since in this particular case one typo COMPLETELY screws up the meaning.
Spelling and grammar are like the Error Correction Code of speech.
You can create Xenu by colliding Katie with Anonymous.
There is a beautiful tradition among the physicists. Once in a 50 billion years they get together and build a hadron collider.
I can't tell it to them because they are not here! If they were still here, then obviously they would be wrong!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It was supposed to be funny guys. Hence the ridiculous title "LHC Cannon". Geez, lighten up.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
"The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?"
I've known since I was in middle school. Mass is the amount of matter in an object. There, and I didn't even need £5bn.
When "scientists" tested the first atomic bomb they weren't 100% sure the chain reaction would stop, but they still did it! Looking back through history at all the "scientists" of their time they always didn't have the full picture. The Earth is flat! Well perhaps it's round but it's the centre of the Universe! Radiation is safe try my radioactive belt for rheumatism! Etc etc. If you hear the words "Trust me I am a scientist, it's safe" then on the 6th word you should be 10 paces away and accelerating fast.
Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
(from Jurassic Park)
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
http://lhccountdown.info/ for latest LHC countdown and info