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LHC Hits an Energy of 3.5TeV
Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."
The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release
About 3 1/2 mosquitoes. I had no idea how tiny the amounts of energy they are using. http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/Science/Glossary-en.php#E
It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams...
From the CMS e-commentary ."..the beams were extremely stable
during this period and had a very long lifetime."
LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.
The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.
From their press release:
"The first attempt to collide beams at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) will follow on a date to be announced in the near future."
Source: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR05.10E.html
If all that it true, doesn't it completely and totally kill the whole "LHC will destroy the world".
You are exactly right. And it’s the failure of every “expert” interviewed who didn’t mention this, and of course of the media hype machine, that that is not well known to everyone.
Oh, and of course mostly to the loonies who want to stay ignorant.
and that the most energetic cosmic rays are 10^8 TeV.
To imagine this: Those particles are so fast that they have the mass of an apple or orange. A subatomic particle! This gives you some feeling for the power.
And yes, that does mean that they create those tiny black holes all the time in our atmosphere.
If this would create black holes, earth would have never existed.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'd think you meant Another World.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_%28video_game%29
It starts with an accelerator.
Of course the correct way to do it would be to multiply the information of the LoC with k*T ln 2 where k = Boltzmann constant, T = temperature of the Library, ln 2 to change from base 2 logarithm (information entropy) to natural logarithm (thermodynamic entropy).
Let's take the 20 million volumes * 200 pages from your calculation, and assume 250 words per page, 4.5 letters per word and 1.4 bits per letter (see directly above table 1, the value for longer text; I've taken the middle, rounded up). With this data, we get a total information content of the LoC of 6.3*10^12 bits. Let's further assume the temperature of LoC is about 290K, then we get the energy equivalent of the LoC as about 0.11 TeV.
Therefore 3.5 TeV is about 32 LoC.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In past and present colliders the luminosity culminates around L = 10^32c^-2 s^-1, in the LHC it will reach L = 10^34cm^-2 s^-1. This will be achieved by filling each of the two rings with 2835 bunches of 10^11 particles each.