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LHC Reaches Record Energy
toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"
Since we're all doomed, how about you send me all you money?
Is this related to the wormhole that opened up above Norway yesterday?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234430/Mystery-spiral-blue-light-display-hovers-Norway.html
http://angryhosting.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/92/92a406b3d33f96b6953bab7efdf4541c1f130c27.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/d0718b906d187ca53b2e5a919c0e50dc2bb920d2/Fenomen_over_Borras_340148c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/c3c879e75fc8f28b8867e8e678300ab6550dddfb/Fenomen_over_Borras_340149c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/37f2e96dcb20b8b968af81799df40f72a36e73e1/1260346061961_198.jpg
http://www.vgtv.no/?id=27553
http://img.waffleimages.com/294526ec517df78cb7535993b41d3cc0dafa0f05/DSC00020_340153b.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/1ff7bad9b6542532a8cdc63bf02b386f891861d0/8fb0b14e0b4c7123618a8783dc35c964.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/9094e12c8e6320a3238bbf7e833c3cf6e36ed3c3/Fenomen_over_Borras_340147c.jpg
http://img.waffleimages.com/e07e495a8589dd769b7640ac21be295f738c1c04/f8ec04b52d3ffb2558f3256fd8f11d0a.jpg
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
So I says, "Super collider? I just met her!" And then they built the super collider. Thank you, you've been a great audience. - Humorbot 5.0
A greater understanding of physics may well be worth the excessive use of energy, as it may lead to better sources of energy tomorrow.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if Kurzweil is right, we'll hit the Singularity in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be solved.
The most optimistic scenario for Higgs discovery would take a few years of running. But there are plenty of other theories to test that can show their first signs already after a few months of running in physics configuration (7 TeV or 10 TeV energy that'll probably be around in January/February). Things like supersymmetry, lepton flavor violation etc.
A herd of Lamas have escaped a local zoo and nibbled on the Christmas lights at CERN. The short caused the cooling system to go off line and the LHC will be off line for five months.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... for certain values of "solved"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
You only need about 0.5mA to send a DeLorian back in time!
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Start running your credit card up... You can't take it with you!
.. and if you've been good, those debt collectors can't follow you!
I lepton the chance to be the FIRST POST!!!!!. and got so charged up about it I got a large hadron. I am still a little fermion. fortunately no black holes were involved, Unfortunately I miss gauged and some braneless boson beat me to the first post. so I had to gluon my post here, The insensitive clod who beat me was probably from the future and came back in time just to ruin my post, I do not for one welcome this new overlord from the future, The positive side of all this negativity is that having his post on top and mine on the bottom does have a quarky strange charm to it (like a flex fuel car’s superposition of states), At the risk of creating a messon this post (like a bird bombings and baguettes) and having it spin out of control I shall anti up. collapse my own wave function and walk myself off the Planck [through a displacement of 1,2 m (0,24 rods. or about 15 wamprats)] before the beams cross and swine flu mutates into ebola on Dec 21st 2012,
I've been following the LHC's progress fairly closely because I find the project absolutely fascinating. On the other hand, I think /. might be overdoing it a bit regarding news on the subject. Half the summary was devoted to explaining what exactly was different from the last posting. As all of the previous posting have explained, it will be a few months before anything truly exciting happens and years after that before the first really valuable scientific discoveries start occurring. Much of the discussion has become: "Are we there yet?" "No." "How about now?" "No." "And now?" "Still no."
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It's called "minimizing downside risk".
Which is a fancy way of saying "well, and what if the Singularity does NOT occur on schedule?"
Personally, I don't think anyone is taking the whole "global warming" thing seriously yet - they're just posturing with another unenforceable (and largely meaningless) Treaty meant to placate the global warming lobby while otherwise doing not very much at all.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The amount of power they used in mere minutes during this experiment could have powered millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time.
About a minute worth of googling shows that the site draws a peak load of about 180 MW when it's running, of which about 120 MW is for the LHC itself. And it doesn't run all the time.
Typical homes are about 2 kW or so, give or take, so that's hardly enough to power "millions of homes and businesses".
Population of Europe is abour 830 million, by the way, so LHC represents approximately zero percent of the energy consumption of Europe (to two significant figures).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is factually incorrect. At peak (experiment running, all detectors running, all computers processing), the LHC will consume 180 MW of energy. This includes all the energy used to heat offices, etc... The actual experiment uses ~22MW of power. It's not "sneeze-at" power consumption, but considering an average household uses ~1kW of power, and the fact the LHC is planned on being shutdown a significant fraction of the year, the assertion that you could power "millions of homes and businesses for a significantly longer period of time" is bogus.
-Bucky
The reason to collide particles coming in from opposite directions is from kinematics. If you shoot a 1 TeV beam at a fixed target you only get roughly 50 or GeV as the center of mass energy (if I remember right it's ca sqrt(2*m_proton*1000)). That square root is a bitch there. If you shoot them head on to each other at equal energy, then you have the full energy at your disposal. Any other configuration will only reduce the effective energy. If I remember right the LHC dipole magnets are created in such a way that they automatically accelerate particles in parallel beamlines in opposite directions if the particles are of the same charge so it's a nice feat allowing for best efficiency. However you have to understand that the particles are effectively for your local observation traveling at the speed of light. They make ca 11500 circuits every second and you have to keep them in orbit. At the same time the bunch is made up of same charge particles that all want to get away from each other. So the technical difficulty is controlling the magnets in sync with the beams to keep them going and if you have two beams going in opposite directions it just become tougher. Hence the slow testing in baby steps (though they are in general huge steps I'd say). In general I hope some accelerator engineer can chime in and explain the precise background.
The LHC uses 120MW, but if you really want to slant the numbers in your favor we can go with the 180MW consumed by the entire CERN complex.
If you wanted to power millions (we'll say 2M, since that's the lowest number that can be called "millions") of homes and businesses, you could only give each one 90W. My modest-sized, well-insulated, gas-heated, largely-flourescent-lighted house consumes roughly 1kW (1000W).
So now that we have the hyperbole out of the way, certainly LHC consumes a lot of power. If you hadn't been greedy, you could've said "could power thousands of homes and businesses" (and left off the assertion that there was some time multiplier involved), and that's true.
However, willingness to spend energy on physics is only in conflict with wanting to conserve energy if either (1) the value of the physics fails to outweigh the value of the power consumed, or (2) there is a more energy-efficient way to do the physics.
Perhaps you think the physics isn't worth doing; those funding it disagree. That does not make them hypocrits.
If you have a more efficient design for the LHC, I'm sure many people would love to see it.
Oh, and there's only one LHC whereas there are millions of homes, millions of vehicles, millions of offices in the world. In other words, millions of opportunities to make incremental energy improvemnts that would cumulatively offset far more power than all of the particle accelerators in the world consume, without the need to sacrifice scientific progress (or much of anything, really).
... LHC also broke the record for working for the longest uninterrupted time.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.
did you mean llama?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama
or perhaps lamia, a child-eating female demon? that would be sexy but would certainly mess up cern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(mythology)
they were attacked by hawaiian trees?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diospyros_sandwicensis
they were attacked by a ukranian pop band?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(band)
ohhh, you meant tibetan religious leaders! why won't those damn buddhist fundamentalists leave science alone!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama
unfortunately, they may know lama, so they'll certainly kick your ass after knocking out cern with a tibetan white crane style kick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lama_(martial_art)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To accelerate particles in opposite directions using the same magnetic field, you'd need to accelerate both positive and negative charged particles (positives go one way, negatives go the other), The Tevatron does this (protons one way, antiprotons the other). You only have to build one ring to contain the particles, but it's a tradeoff because you have to generate the anti-particles, which is an expensive process (basically, take regular particles, slam them into a fixed target and you get some % out the other side as antiparticles.).
-Bucky
This is your boss. Get back to work!!
Compiling!
With a Beowulf cluster of memes already used I was afraid natalie portman's hot grits would make my post too memeingfull.
Carry on.
Someone goes to all the effort to make a perfectly reasonable Back to the Future joke and you have to kill it with your infernal logic. Great Scott, how dare you! This is so heavy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"