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Life and Work On the LHC At CERN
An anonymous reader sends in a CNet Crave interview with a working physicist at CERN. The interview is full of detail about what it's like to work in this geek paradise (if a bit dumbed-down for an audience assumed not very technical). Dr. Paul Jackson, a particle physicist working on the LHC's Atlas experiment, says there's no chance of black holes wiping us out, and that the time travel speculation is bunkum. He is 100% convinced that they will find the Higgs boson. The scientists there favor Macs, while computers in the control room are Linux-based. "What would happen if you were standing in front of the beam? You would die. It would be a pretty spectacular death, and you wouldn't know a lot about it. ... It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body."
I'm curious about this point because under a previous LHC article, someone commented that "11 trillion electron volts sounds impressive, but when I flick something with my finger, far more energy is transferred." (paraphrase, obviously)
Could someone more versed in physics tell a layman how this scales up?
I'm not a physicist, but I typed "11 TeV in Joules" into Google and it says "1.76239411 × 10-6 joules". That's not very much energy. It's enough to accelerate 1.7 micrograms from rest to a velocity of one meter per second -- a gnat's whisker to a slow walk. Yeah, flicking a finger is far more energetic.
However, that's the energy in the most energetic particles in the particle stream. There are a lot of particles in the stream, so their total energy is much higher.
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Well, the beams have the energy equivalent of 87 KG of TNT. Your statement implies that standing in front of the beam would cause you to explode, which I very much doubt.
I am curious as to what actually WOULD happen. The beams themselves are very narrow (on the order of a millimeter according to http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm ). With such a tiny size I might guess the beam would quickly cut a hole straight through you.
AccountKiller
Your statement implies that standing in front of the beam would cause you to explode, which I very much doubt.
I am curious as to what actually WOULD happen.
This is the closest thing I could find:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
http://forgetomori.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/anatolibugorski3.jpg
http://www.index.hr/images2/anatoli-bugorski_W.jpg
http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/bloggraphics/anatoli.jpg
Dude, like a true Slashdotter you didn't RTFA, congratulations. Dr. Jackson didn't use the exact words mentioned in the summary (except, of course, the direct quote RE: 87kg of TNT).
In reference to the black holes, he gives a short but complete explanation of why they would not destroy the planet.
And about the Higgs boson, he said "I'd put the chance we will find the Higgs boson or something similar to it at pretty close to 100 per cent."
The summary is not misleading, but the scientist didn't really use the emphasis you frown upon.