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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.
"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
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.
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 :-).
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.
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.
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...)
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
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
> 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
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
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?
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.
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
It's always nice to see complex engineering projects that work. It gives the impression that theory and reality are getting closer.
Theory and reality are the same, at least in theory.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
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.
"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.
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In related news, towel sales #s are on an upward trend.
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.
..... is .... 42!
No sig today...
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.
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.
Yeah, but at that point, the girls will all be too tall and skinny
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
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
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...
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.
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.
Thats the new secretary, it might be worth exploring what else she sucks in.
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/
All this was was an initial test, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the collider. Nothing was actually collided.
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.'"
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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
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
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.