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LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts
The LHC has become the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, weighing in at over one trillion electron volts. "Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts. On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this 'pilot beam,' reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT. The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001. The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts."
Troll?
It was only switched on again a week ago, and you want it to be spewing out Higgs' already?!!?
These machines are *stunningly* complex, and always take years to reach their full potential. Google for the luminosity history of any major machine (LEP, Tevatron, etc.) to see how long they took to reach their design goals.
Trust me, as a particle physicist (posting anonymously to preserve moderations), this week has been amazingly exciting, and everyone I know is stunned by how fast this machine is coming back on.
"step it up a notch" -- you *must* be a troll.
My understanding is that the faster you can move particles around, the harder you can smash them together. The harder you can smash them together, the easier it is to see the fundamental building blocks of those pieces. Imagine a car wreck with both cars doing 50mph. Now imagine the same wreck with each car doing 100mph. Which will break the cars into smaller pieces.
Religions don't object to research into the unknown because faith gives confidence that the answers are either already known or theologically irrelevant.
Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.
Well, all money ever does is employ people. That's what money is - a way to get other people to give you the product of their labors.