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Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Generates a 'Mini-Big Bang'
buildslave writes "The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a 'mini-Big Bang' by smashing together lead ions instead of protons. The scientists working at the enormous machine on the Franco-Swiss border achieved the unique conditions on 7 November. The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than the center of the Sun."
So, is a mini-big bang just a bang, then?
I hate this constant need for science journalists to oversell and over-hype an outstanding achievement with misleading hyperbole. They didn't create mini big bangs. They smashed lead ions to try to recreate the conditions that existed shortly after the big bang. It's already an impressive enough achievement without cheapening it with sensationalist BS.
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BAZINGA!
Wouldn't a mini big bang just be a moderate bang?
Evil people are out to get you.
Now show us a real big-bang so the creationists are silenced
So some scientists did some banging at the large hardon collider over the weekend and said it was really hott.
Now, if we can just wait a few billion years, a suitably intelligent species should evolve inside the newly created universe and build a Very Very Very Small Hadron Collider(VVVSHC) in order to investigate the conditions of their early universe....
The window in which you can make stupid comments about playing god and recursing (no tired xkcd links allowed, about either pebbles or carving dice) is now closing. Please get in your cheesy gloom-and-doom scenarios ASAP, and make wild, uneducated suppositions about micro black holes while you're at it.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The output energy probably wouldn't have exceeded the input energy. No chain reaction or anything.
I'd imagine a mass the size of two lead ions at a trillion degrees could only maybe bring a gallon of room temperature water up a degree or two. They are quite small.
Who the fuck is ALICE?
One of the accelerator's experiments, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions...
Well, I guess that answers that.
If we are gods, we can only hope our creations are morally superior to us.
Hey, suddenly Jehovah the blood thirsty desert god makes a lot more sense.
The title is misleading. The LHC did not create a mini 'big bang' but created a miniature of the conditions that might have existed shortly AFTER the big bang. The 'big bang' was the event that created all mass, space, and time in the entire universe in a single instant approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The LHC collision of lead ions did not create any mass, space, or time but did create a "hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma" that might have existed after the 'big bang' event.
Nah, it's just monday...
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
R. A. Heinlein
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
NVidia achieved that years ago.
Yup, it does, but we can do fusion. If we just cared about fusing atoms together, that was doable by ZETA (primitive tokamak) in the 1950's. But making a reactor that can generate net energy gain is a trick.
Oh, that is FAR above the temperatures needed for controlled fusion.
We don't have any trouble creating the necessary temperature for controlled fusion. The part we aren't able to do is the "controlled" bit - in a way that allows a net positive energy return.
I'm guessing this collision released maybe a few kcal of energy (which is HUGE for two atom-sized masses, but otherwise on-par with a candle), but it probably consumed the resources from half of a power plant in the process.
The LHC isn't about energy generation - it is about generating huge concentrations of energy in an extremely small volume of space.
And if we do it all together, is it a gang bang?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Uh, that's what "mini big bang" means. OK, so you don't like it, but who cares.
It isn't cheap sensational BS, it's expensive evocative BS at worst.
100% agreement. Its ridiculous for the OP to get a bug up his ass over that headline. Headlines need to be short and sweet (aka maximally informative to the intended audience) - the BBC's headline is both, the OP's version is far too long to use as a headline. Might fine for the title of a scientific paper, but not a general news website.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is all fine, until Oracle buys the LHC and offers an Enterprise Level "Bang" and a free-bang.
We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust. I guess we'll just have to adjust.
Freeon is the open source version of Freon, and is more properly called GNU/Freeon.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I'd imagine a mass the size of two lead ions at a trillion degrees could only maybe bring a gallon of room temperature water up a degree or two. They are quite small.
Just to keep things in context, they actually shot a rather large number of lead ions at each other in the hopes of getting two to collide.
There's a huge amount of energy zipping around, it's just that the odds of it all releasing at once approaches zero.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's actually 0.1mJ (or 1138TeV) per collision (half that per ion). They have ways to go before hitting 1 cal. However, within the volume of a nucleus, that's still a crazy concentration of energy.
Also, a beam has a *lot* of ions (they're starting with 2e10/beam but I believe their goal is 100x that before the end of the month). That's 10MJ/beam before the end of the month, which is already a fairly serious amount of energy to have in a particle beam.
I refuse to use
You are quite a long way off with your estimate, though you're right that the effect would be small.
One mole of lead is 207 grams so the energy you are talking about would cause a 1 K rise in only (207 * 2 * 10^12) / (6.02 * 10^23) or 6.9 * 10^-10 grams of lead.
That's less than the mass of a human ovum. Orders of magnitude (mass)
And the heat capacity (by mass) of water is about 32 times that of lead so you could heat up even less than that - just over 2 * 10^-11 grams of water.
It's between particles, regardless of their kind. At room temperature, atoms within molecules also participate in heat exchange; this is why for adiabatic compression of ideal gas you need to know if it has monoatomic, biatomic or bigger molecules - this affects the vibrational modes within the molecule. Again at room temperature, quantum physics prevents this exchange to continue inside the atoms - in non-metals, the atom-atom collisions happen below the energy that can knock electrons out of them, let alone affect their nuclei.
But here we're talking about many orders of magnitude above room temperature, and what used to happens to molecules and atoms inside them happens to quarks and gluons. The important thing is that in proton collisions, the particles don't stay together long enough to achieve thermal equilibrium, so it makes no sense to talk about thermodynamics. But with lead ions, if quark-gluon plasma formation in fact happens (gathering data needed to prove or disprove this is part of the experiment), the particles interact enough times that we can talk about temperatures, pressures and so on.
I refuse to use
I don't think big bang theory plays into this scientific investigation at all (it's more of an astronomical theory). The language used in the article is designed so that they lay person may understand why it is relevant.
But my point is that they don't know a lot about the nuclear strong force, that's why these experiments are necessary.
That's what the Free Mesons want you to believe.
we've been unable to prove anything so far, but here's a story pulled out of the collective asses of village elders 3000 years ago...
Actually, if you replace "village elders" with "theorists" and 3,000 years with "several" this is almost exactly like science: we come up with a theory which we have not yet proved and then act on it as if it were true to see what the implications are and then test those implications. The slight, but very important, difference being that if someone manages to prove the "story" wrong we'll listen to them, give them a nobel prize and rewrite the story whereas religion has a bad track record of burning them at the stake (although even science's record is not blemish free).