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Life and Work On the LHC At CERN

Posted by kdawson on from the one-ordinary-day-with-teravolt-beams dept.

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."

1 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:mythbusters have to test the 87kg of TNT part n by A+Friendly+Troll · · Score: 4, Informative

    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