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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.
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.
It was a triumph, I'm making a note here, huge success!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
You're all still here.
will the doomsayers ever learn for the next time?
Well, they still haven't made the black hole yet. Just wait. When you get sucked in don't come crying to me. I'll be many, many light years away.
My blog
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
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.
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...)
Alien species are certainly going to take pictures of that and add the words EPIC FAIL on top.
Pass the c-
What do you mean all the cake is gone?
MABASPLOOM!
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
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
I thought they had already turned it on yesterday... Wait, today is September 10th... Again ?
Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
The image is produced by an event display program, which provides a nice visual representation of the output of the whole detector (ATLAS in this case) for one event. One event here means one beam crossing, generally, which could include up to several proton-proton collisions, but generally only one interesting one.
Now, I'm not completely familiar with ATLAS (I'm a CDF guy), but I'm pretty sure the top left section is the muon chambers. These record, well, muons, which are the only thing which interacts poorly enough to consistently punch all the way through the detector and the layers of steel in front of the muon chambers, but strongly enough to be recorded all the way along its passage.
The top center shows a zoomed in view of the middle of the top left: the calorimeters. Calorimeters record the amount of energy that enters them, and are arranged radially, so that you can see just how much energy (in the form of both mass and kinetic energy) was carried away from the collision in a particular direction. This is accomplished by means of scintillator crystals, which tend to get ionized by the passage of high energy particles, thus absorbing some energy from the particles, and then they reemit that energy as photons, which are collected and measured in photomultiplier tubes. The calorimeters are used to look for most particles, particularly electrons and "jets" (which are a spray of particles resulting from the ejection of a quark from the collision), both of which leave clusters of energy over a significant area of the calorimeter.
The top right is again a zoomed in view of the middle of the top center: the tracking chambers. These act sort of like thousands and thousands of geiger counters; every time a charged particle passes through the vicinity of a wire in the tracking chamber, it records a hit. You can then piece all these hits together in a line to measure the track of a particle. The offcenter pink and blue line is almost certainly a cosmic ray, which will naturally leave a track in the chamber, but not appear to originate from the interaction point. In the lower left, you can see what is probably two different short track segments.
The first three images have been more or less slices out of the center of the detector, perpendicular to the beam line. The lower left is a side-on view, showing the somewhat less important parts of the detector that lie at small angles to the beam line, the so-called forward detectors.
The lower right is probably intended to be a flat plot of the calorimeter, as if you sliced it parallel to the beam line and unrolled it. The height of the bars would then indicate how much energy was deposited in each section. However, at the moment, that plot looks like it is having some sort of overflow problems.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
*By definition* the doomsayers are always wrong. If they had ever been correct in the past, we wouldn't be here to talk about it now.
By the same token, your claim that everything is going to be fine is a one-way bet. You can only be proved right.
(+5, Inevitable)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
>> ... 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".
The doomsayers only need to be right once... :)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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
That does it. I'm tagging this story 'stillalive'.
Electricity costs, mainly. EDF gives CERN a discount because we use so much of it, but they hike their prices up in the winter when people use more energy. Also, the winter shutdown gives people breathing space to decide what to do next, lessons to learn etc. I think in the case of LHC they could probably afford to keep it running, but there's no real point. They're going to use the time to work out how to increase from their expected pre-winter centre of mass energy of 10 TeV to 14 TeV. This is all standard accelerator practice, as far as I know.
xterm -n 8
I'll be many, many light years away.
Infinitely many, in fact, if you haven't gotten sucked into the black hole yet.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
Or: "Every time you masturbate, God destroys a planet" ...
And the ones who lost their bets with Stephen Hawking about whether they'd find the Higgs Boson.
Isn't the real science not happening for like another 11 months?
You'll have that sometimes...
We Built It For The Lulz.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Yes, it is September 10th again. You are caught in a time loop. The last time through, the world was destroyed by a black hole. This time, you have again failed to stop the activation, so the same thing will happen. At this point you will wake up 24 hours before the LHC is activated, and realize that you alone can save humanity. To do so you must get to the Swiss/French border and blow the thing to smithereens before it can be turned on.
The presence of this post is of course a major plot hole / deus ex machina, but is necessary to move the storyline along and keep you from going through the time loop fifty times before figuring it all out, as this would make your adventure far too long and repetitive for the people of my alternate universe to enjoy watching footage of.
Kids, take note. This is what happens to your typing, grammar, and spelling when you sniff too much glue.
In another news: Gordon Freeman has been spotted in CERN test chamber.
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.
All this was was an initial test, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the collider. Nothing was actually collided.