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LHC Powers Up To 4 TeV
An anonymous reader writes "Due to a decision made at Chamonix, the LHC will operate with a 4 TeV beam energy in 2012. This will allow them to collect as much data as possible (15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS) before the whole accelerator complex gets shut down for about 20 months to prepare for even higher energies. 'By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,' said CERN's Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. 'Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.'"
They could easily double their funding if they told the US military there may be a way to weaponize the Higgs. Or at least they could call it a black hole gun. It might be hard to find a ship large enough to mobilize it.
Given that we don't "Know" anything of note for sufficiently rigorous definitions of the word(arguably, capital 'K' "knowledge" seems to alternate between being a philosopher's dream and being a straw man...), 'know' makes pretty decent shorthand for the somewhat unwieldy long-form account of the precise flavor of the information provided by science.
By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs
If the scientists have any sense of humour at all, they will schedule the final test at maximum power for December 21st, 2012.
You must be thinking of the various bloodstained and headless subatomic particles that Schrödinger's damn cat keeps leaving just outside the lab door, after batting them around for its amusement...
And in any case it wouldn't be hyperbole. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, hyperbole is wild exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Claiming that something is 100% reliable rather than, say, 99.5%, is not hyperbole. It is just slight overstatement.
Now please remove yourself from my philosophical lawn.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Noooo, the Romulans are the ones that use an artificial singularity in their warp drives, we need a drunk madman with a nuclear delivery vehicle.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The bump around 125 is fairly close to a discovery already. The first time they release fully analyzed data at all this year will be enough for a five sigma discovery. After seeing what kind of lag they have between data gathering and release, I'd say the discovery will be announced in August.
The enemies of Democracy are
I first read that as THC powers up, I thought they'd found some new super marijuana.
My pet peeve with the use of "know" in relation to science stems from the public confusion as to what science can and cannot absolutely know.
Thanks to overstating the abilities of science to prove something, juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases, the discussion of competing theories is seen as indecision, and a scientist who accurately states a probability is often portrayed as inconclusive. By substituting "have compelling evidence" in place of "know", scientists could make accurate statements and educate the public at the same time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Yeah, PER PROTON. Want to read about the "beam dumps" LHC uses to dissipate the beam's energy when they need to remove it from the accelerator ring?
http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/beam-dump.htm
"Each beam dump absorber consists of a 7m long segmented carbon cylinder of 700mm diameter, contained in a steel cylinder, comprising the dump core (TDE). This is water cooled, and surrounded by about 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump is housed in a dedicated cavern (UD) at the end of the transfer tunnels (TD). "
"The nominal LHC beam contains an unprecedented stored energy of 350 MJ, contained in 2808 bunches with a beam sigma of the order of 0.3 mm."
With the first link, the chain is forged.
for most people, the difference between 0% and 99% certainty is not relevant when it comes to believing that something exists.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
That's only true if you're of the belief that knowledge in and of itself isn't a commodity worth having for a given price. That's certainly not an interpretation of things I subscribe to.
You're point isn't invalid by any stretch, it is in fact the core of a very good argument. But it's one I'd argue against strenuously. In fact, I'd argue that every step towards a total understanding of our universe, no matter how small the step, is worth virtually any cost placed on it. The toys we may sacrifice as a result of that pursuit is more than a worthy tradeoff to make. The knowing in the end is its own best reward.
I'd also hold that over the long-term all those 1 bit advancements in knowledge pay us back tenfold or better. Think of the relatively minor advances in knowledge that pure science and experimentation had to provide before we could invent the transistor, and then think about all the benefits that invention has led to. I think it'd be nearly impossible to argue that ratio isn't magnificent. Sure, I can't say knowing whether the Higgs is real or not would have a similar outcome, but nor can anyone say for sure it won't. Therefore, the only option is to proceed down the path of discovery and pay the opportunity cost along the way in the hope that a similar situation to the transistor might arise.
I make the same type of argument for human exploration of space. As easy as it is to argue against such ventures on the basis of cost and risk and other things, the benefit we may derive from it, not only on incidental technological invention but in pure knowledge that we can only guess at, is worth it no matter what the cost. At least, it is to me.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Here it is: (http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000570)
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The art of dumping
Say a magnet quenches, too much beam goes off course, or—the most likely yet least dramatic scenario—the beams have lost too many protons during normal collisions and scientists need to load a fresh set. What happens to the old beams? Even at the ends of their usual 10-hour life spans they still hold 200 megajoules of energy that can't be sent just anywhere.
“This beam is not a danger by itself,” Schmidt says, “but the fact that it can deposit its energy in a tenth of a thousandth of a second makes it dangerous to the machine.”
When the time comes, the beams are extracted, or dumped, into two huge cylindrical blocks. Eight meters long, one meter in diameter, and made of graphite composites encased in concrete, they are the only thing that can withstand the full power of the beam. But first the beam has to be diffused, because in its compressed form it would drill a hole tens of meters long in any material.
So as the beams pass out of the LHC, they spread out and hit the blocks in a shape that resembles a cursive “e.” The dump takes just eighty-millionths of a second, dilutes the energy of the beam by a factor of 100,000 and heats the center of the lines that make up the “e” to almost 700C.
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And here is a throughout description of the beam dump interaction (i.e. what happens to whatever the LHC hits with a 7TeV beam):
http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/BeamdumpInteraction.pdf
It will start a nice fire, indeed. Heh. But all that concrete is there because protons scattering when they hit something are really annoying to electronics, and not safe to someone that takes too many of them (by standing just to the side of the beam target).