World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion

evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."

Caution - low-flying quarks

[billstewart]

Watch out for leftover jaggedy fragments of atoms. And if CERN gets involved, there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.

Re:Caution - low-flying quarks

[eclectro]

there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.

Because smashing atoms the old way was sooo Web 1.0

Re:

[The Zon]

This is tremendous improvement over the Small Hadron Collider, which was only big enough to smash one atom at a time. The Large Hadron Collider will smash at least two, which is the minimum number of atoms for a Web 2.0 social framework.

Watch out for J0hn Tit0r

[CDMA_Demo]

I think he's on his way to completion as well.

Re:Caution - low-flying quarks

[aweraw]

I'm more concerned about the probability of a resonance cascade scenario...

By the way, have you seen my crowbar?

Re:

[somersault]

Yeah, I think only about 2 people would have got it if you hadn't pointed it out, hi-larious..!

Sorry :p

Re:

[timtwobuck]

I'm not sure I would have gotten it if it wasn't modded +5 funny. The crowbar was the dead give away

Re:

[somersault]

exactly - if it didn't have the crowbar bit it wouldn't be so obvious... then it may be worth explaining to people

Quick!

[LiquidCoooled]

Somebody wake Jodie Foster up, the machine is nearly ready!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll see about that!

-Crazy Religious Nutjob

Re:

[LiquidCoooled]

I hope Japan have an Ace up their sleeve.

Re:

[arcite]

ALWAYS build a backup!

Acknowledgement ...

[foobsr]

To whom it conCERN [web.cern.ch]s.

The world seems to be more complex than just wired up.

CC.

Re:Acknowledgement ...

[DAldredge]

Cool - I didn't know CERN was on the web :)

Re:

[maynard]

They even have their own supported Linux Distribution [web.cern.ch], currently based on Scientific Linux 3.x.

Re:

[The_Wilschon]

I'm assuming that you just left out your [/sarcasm] tag, but I'll still say this for the poor people who don't know. CERN [info.cern.ch] started the web [wikipedia.org].

you know duck scientists are having a field day...

[Bananatree3]

when you hear a rising call from their labs...Quarrk, Quarrkk, Quark!

Re:

[Bananatree3]

What do the kitten scientists say, "Muon, muon"?

That would be the cow scientists.

Black holes

[Dan East]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet? Maybe a little sightseeing on the ISS would be a good idea about that time. That would buy me a couple extra weeks.

Dan East

Re:

[Durrok]

I somehow doubt a black hole appearing around what you are orbiting would do you much good :p

Re:

[Dan East]

I'm no physicist, but the mass of the earth (and thus its gravity) would not change, just its density. So the ISS (satellites, moon, etc) should keep orbiting just the same. In fact, the ISS might last longer, since there would be less atmosphere to slow it down. I think.

Dan East

Re:Black holes

[Atlantis-Rising]

The swartzchild radius of a black hole with the mass of the earth is, IIRC, 9 millimeters.
I have no idea what the LHC is supposed to do, but if it turns the earth into a blackhole (which seems fantastically unlikely to me, but then, I'm no physicist either), yeah the ISS will be out of the atmosphere.
Unless the earth gains an accretion disk...

Re:Black holes

[delt0r]

There is no way to turn the earth into a black hole. \. people read to many Nexus magazines and newpapers. NewScientist is almost as bad.

First of all there are particles hiting the earth with more energy than the LHC will produce, so if it can produce them it won't be the first one created on earth. Secondly even if it can produce a black hole (very cool by the way) it will evaporate in like 10^-20 seconds. Thridly a black hole does not change the gravity of the contained mass. So a black hole made out of a few quarks is going to have the gravitational pull of a few quarks. aka none.

Re:

[PermanentMarker]

I'm sorry to say but the orignal comment might be true
At least artificaly tiny blackholes have been created by now
(with the gold atoms smashing expiriments) those block holes existed ony a few mili mili seconds but their intake of mass and their behaviour was not normal. Luckly so far these blackholes where not stable.

You can find such info back at newscientist site if yu like.
But don't say i didnt warned you for this.

Re:

[kalirion]

We won't have a tiny black hole eating the Earth from the inside until the AIs decide that the planet needs to be done away with. I just hope the farcaster network will be complete before the final evacuation.

Re:

[Waffle Iron]

OTOH (ignoring for now the unlikelyhood of this event), typically about 50% of the matter falling into a black hole is converted to pure energy by the frictional forces of the swirling vortex and radiated into space. The ISS would be vaporized in an instant, and even the moon might not come out looking too good.

Re:Black holes

[fred fleenblat]

The thinking is that any black holes that are created by the LHC would be so small that they would evaporate in an instant, probably within milliseconds of devouring the earth and sun. So there's nothing to worry about really.

Just a quick nip down the pub for some peanuts...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Aren't we supposed to place a bag over our heads or something?"

"If you like."

"Will that help?"

"No, not at all..."

Re:Black holes

[Danga]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about. I have read a few articles on the subject and it seems highly unlikely anything catastrophic could happen if small black holes are created. Here are some quotes from one interesting article http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060919_b lack_holes.html [livescience.com]:

"Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, before they could gobble up any significant amount of matter"

and

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

"However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

So, if Hawking is right we should be safe and even if he is wrong it sounds like we should still be safe. Of course nobody knows for sure which is somewhat scary but I don't think it means we should scrap the whole project in this particular case.

Re:Black holes

[klaun]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about.

It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.

Re:

[Danga]

Yes, you are correct and in the article I linked to above they mentioned that (although not in as much detail as you):

"CERN spokesman and former research physicist James Gillies also pointed out that Earth is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes all the time, and the planet hasn't been destroyed yet."

Re:

[arevos]

That's the first I'd heard of it. Could you provide a link to the results collected so far from the Pierre Auger Observatory?

Re:Slightly less than 10^20

[tkittel]

I am sorry, but while relatively well informed, your post is not right on the mark.

First of all, particles of energies higher than 10^20eV have been observed in several experiments since the first observation in Utah in 1991. Just google for ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) or "oh my god particle". The existence of these particles above the GZK cut-off is not really a disputed fact.

The study and theoretical understanding of these UHECRs are in fact becoming a sub-field of its own today, and I have seen it come up again and again in the last couple of years at conferences.

The point here is that the GZK cut-off only applies to particles originating _very_ far away (more than 50 mega parsecs), since an UHECR produced "locally" could reach us without having a significant change to interact with the cosmic microwave background. The current theoretical puzzlement thus does not have to do with the observation of particles violating some fundamental law, but is due to the fact that people do not know of any "local" source in our neighbourhood which could produce particles of such high energies. There is certainly no indication that this affects the SM, and certainly not the big bang theory.

Of course, as a particle physicist, I would *hope* that the effects are due to physics beyond the SM, but I would guess it is more likely that the answer is going to be that we do not understand all astrophysical objects as well as we had hoped.

Re:Black holes

[ImaNihilist]

They weren't exactly sure what would happen when they set off the first atom bomb either.

Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.

Re:Black holes

[Danga]

Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.

Ha, I agree that we must out do the dino's, that would be quite funny. The problem with wiping ourselves out with a black hole is a passing alien craft may detect a black hole where our civilization used to be but they would probably have no idea we even existed.

That is why I think wiping ourselves out with self-replicating nano bots would be much more funny. Then a passing alien craft would come across a milky way sized swarm of these nano bots and think to themselves "what dumbass civilization did this to themselves?".

Wouldn't matter

[Interfacer]

because (I admit I am rusty on this) as far as ISS and our sattelites are concerned, it doesn't matter whether all the earth's mass is compress in a black hole or not. Gravity wouldn't change from their POV, as long as they are outside the event horizon.

So the aliens would still find those.
Maybe before we throw the switch, we should launch a small time capsule with a brittanica DVD or a wiki backup, together with an explanation of what we are about to do.

Re:

[SamSim]

I like the idea of a passing civilisation landing and colonising the moon, then after a few years one of their kids is running around in the outskirts of their little "town" and they find some footprints... and a discarded lunar module. They figure out that the ship couldn't possibly travel between stars. Or even between planets. So where did it come from?

Re:

[Prof.Phreak]

"what dumbass civilization did this to themselves?"

Eh. We can say that about every black hole.

Re:Black holes

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?

Re:

[Iron Condor]

>"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?

Actually it sounds like a quote from the Earth Destruction Manual [qntm.org], which starts "Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.[...]"

Re:

[kalirion]

It's true. Even if you succeed, those pesky dolphins will ruin everything.

Re:

[Markus Registrada]

In other words, we probably already have black holes, have had 'em like forever, and haven't even noticed 'em. (Must be like cooties.)

Re:

[Ancil]

"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

So he says.. But what does he know, anyway?

This guy [qntm.org] takes the time to quantify his assertions. That's a real scientist.

As a public service, here's a link to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board [qntm.org].
Current Earth Status: NOT DESTROYED.

Re:

[pallmall1]

Of course nobody knows for sure which is somewhat scary ...

There's only one way to find out. :)

Re:

[msobkow]

The giant underground loop of tunnels, magnets and detectors will be capable of replicating conditions just after the Big Bang,

Is there anything in Hawking's theories or equations that presumes the Big Bang was a zero-point beginning?

What if the zero point of the big bang is just an extremely rare congruence of larger functions and transformations?

Not to worry, it would have already happened

[ebers]

Physicists are hoping that they will see signs of tiny black holes forming and instantly evaporating. If they can be produced by the energies of the LHC, then they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays, which have far more energy per particle (up to 10^20 eV) than what the LHC can do. (7*10^12 eV). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cos mic_ray [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Kabuthunk]

Even if a tiny black hole were to be created, it would likely disappear almost instanteously via Hawking Radiation. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for details.

The concerns regarding it however are:
Creation of a stable black hole
Creation of strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
Creation of magnetic monopoles that could catalyze proton decay
Triggering a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum

Wikipedia mentions the black hole would likely disappear, but it didn't mention anything regarding the o

Re:

[The_Wilschon]

These concerns were already raised with the startup of RHIC. Nothing has happened yet (although that doesn't mean that nothing will happen). Cosmic rays, however, have much higher energies, and when they collide with other particles (for instance, molecules of our atmosphere), much higher energy densities are reached. This has been going on for billions of years, and nothing has happened yet, which suggests that the probability of LHC or RHIC causing such an event are almost certainly exceedingly small.

Negative Strangelets

[Ihlosi]

Black holes are boring. They may exists, but they'll probably evaporate in an instant if they're ever created in the LHC.

However ...

Negative strangelets would be a completely different beast. It's not exactly sure whether they actually exist, or if they would be stable, but if the answer is yes for both questions, they could gobble up earth faster than a miniature black hole, since they would attract matter (positively charged atomic nuclei, mostly) by their electrical charge (negative), which is stronger b

Re:

[Broken scope]

The actual black hole isn't that large, they have huge amounts of mass. Mass that is linked to their size. They can be big and small.

Re:Black holes

[PieSquared]

A black hole *might* not actually need to be super massive, it just has to be huge to be seen beyond the solar system. As for the basic physics part, pretty much yes - a few atoms properly smashed could take up 0 space, have an event horizon, and totally block light outside the actual mass... making it a black hole. Such an object could in theory destroy each additional atom it hit, slowly growing as it went back and forth through the earth until the entire earth was a part of it. The problem, though, is threefold. First, black holes emit energy, and a small black hole would probably emit energy faster then it could gain energy, meaning it would die pretty much instantly. (*far* less then a second). Second, if the black hole didn't disappear instantly, it would probably be thrown out of earth orbit by the massive speed of the device. Finally, the black holes would be so small that they wouldn't actually hit protons very often. This sounds odd, but the same thing is true of galaxies... the milky way one day will hit the andromada galaxy, but statistically there will be about 6 collisions of stars before it becomes one stable system. The nucleus of an atom is just so small in comparison to the space the atom takes up due to its electron shell... and of course the event horizon for such a small black hole would be incredibly small (much smaller then the original particles). The belief is that if despite all odds a stable black hole was created and fell into the ground, the sun would go nova before we noticed anything wrong with the earth because of the black hole. In conclusion, a small black hole probably can't exist. Well, at least on the several atoms scale. Even if it can exist (we don't really know for sure that it can't) it won't do any real damage to earth. I guess flinging black holes into space might not be a great idea on the multi-billion year scale, but within the probable lifespan of humanity probably nobody would notice.

Jumbonium smasher!

[Majik Sheff]

I was wondering when we'd have the equipment to smash the world's largest atom!

Re:

[straponego]

Why blow a chance at all those tourist dollars? A lot of people would pay good money to see the World's Largest Atom. Locate it next to a Dairy Queen and it'd be a perfect stop during those long drives through, say, Kansas. Wait... do Kansans believe in atoms?

Re:

[Dunbal]

Wait... do Kansans believe in atoms?

      Of course they do. What they DON'T believe in is radioactive decay...

Politics of high-end theoretical physics

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear they're trying to pass a law in congress defining a traditional meson as being between one quark and one anti-quark.

In the mean time....

[stox]

HEP research in the United States is grinding to a halt. The DOE has nothing on the board for Fermilab, SLAC, etc. past 2010. While I admire and respect the work the Europeans are doing ( with little help from the US ), I am deeply concerned that this nation is losing its way. Basic R&D is the foundation that made the US what it was in the 20th century. We are doing less and less of it everyday. Unless the Clowns^H^H^H^H^HEsteemed politicians in Washington wake up soon, the US will soon become a second rate nation.

Re:

[JudgeFurious]

I think it's probably a bit past their wake up time actually. An argument could easily be made that the US is already a second rate nation whose residents continues to live a first rate life thanks to their rapidly eroding credit rating. It won't be long before reality comes calling.

 

Re:In the mean time....

[realmolo]

That's because there's no good way to "monetize" physics. If the particle-accelerator crowd wants funding they need to find a way to:

1. Allow teenagers to upload videos to the accelerator 2. Allow teenagers to download ringtones from the accelerator 3. Allow teenagers to instant-message entangled particles on the other side of the universe

Re:

[glesga_kiss]

That's because there's no good way to "monetize" physics. If the particle-accelerator crowd wants funding they need to find a way to:

1. Allow teenagers to upload videos to the accelerator 2. Allow teenagers to download ringtones from the accelerator 3. Allow teenagers to instant-message entangled particles on the other side of the universe

Or you could go with the more traditional route and suggest that it could be used to kill people. You'll get all the funding you need.

Re:

[14CharUsername]

They could also work on developing a death ray of some sort. Or maybe work on opening up a portal to a different dimension that is outside of the jurisdiction of the geneva convention.

Re:

[starwed]

Interestingly enough, I've heard that SLAC gets some of their funding from private companies now, (Microsoft, Google, etc...), on the order of a few hundred million dollars.

Re:In the mean time....

[Markus Registrada]

If high-energy-physicists had any questions they wanted answers to, there might be more reason to invest in expensive toys for them. As it happens, they all seem tied up doing string theory, which (notoriously) offers no predictions to test.

In the meantime, condensed-matter physicists, fluid-dynamic physicists, and plasma physicists (not to mention meteorologists, metabolic geneticists, and what-have-you) have never swung the kind of budgets you get, evidently, from having made an atom bomb once, despite that each group have collectively produced far more positive and far fewer negative effects on our daily lives.

(No, I'm not in any of those groups.)

Astronomers sometimes do swing big budgets, but they deliver astonishingly pretty pictures of stuff that really is out there -- however much they prefer to talk about stuff that's not in the pictures. Long after they've all changed their minds about the latter, we'll still have the pictures.

Speaking personally (and at deep risk of spiteful moderation) I wouldn't mind a century-long hiatus in particle-accelerator funding. There's plenty of science to be done by regular grad students at regular workbenches, and to much greater (perhaps even beneficial!) effect.

Mod Parent Up, Please

[littlewink]

The parent makes a point that should be stressed.

High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.

Astrophysicist David Lindley wrote The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory [amazon.com], a book that explains the current state of affairs in high-energy physics and astrophysics.

As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.

Re:

[radtea]

High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable.

One of the things that differentiates science from other areas of human endeavour is that science uses up fields of study. Once upon a time there was a major scientific enterprise involving filling out the peroidic table. New elements were isolated every few years. Eventually, all the blanks were filled in, leaving only a very small number of labs pursuing the trans-uranics.

In traditional

Re:

[Markus Registrada]

The problem is that string theory is too flexible to offer specific predictions to test.

The problem is that string theorists are really mathematicians not content to subsist on maths departments' budgets, or to submit to elder mathematicians' standards of rigor. They quit doing physics two decades back.

Clearly the fusion people get this kind of money. ITER is a $12 billion project.

The fusion people aren't doing science. ITER is an engineering project meant to draw away funding that might otherwise b

Re:More research?

[arthurpaliden]

The reason why research is slowly grinding to a halt in the United States is because the people of the United States have finaly realized that you do not have to spend billions of dollars to get the answers to 'life the universe and every thing else". Just go to the holy book of your choice. The answers are all there.

Re:

[stox]

The bias isn't the LHC, per se, the bias is whatever the largest highest energy collider at the moment is. Sadly, the SSC was a corrupt mess. Though some incredible physics can be done in other places, the highest probability is still at the largest collider. Besides the goal of the experiments, some very profitable technologies have descended from the quest. The direct goal of the experiment may not have had immediate effect, but the tools developed along the way have. For example; the web (CERN), computer

Higgs boson

[Dachannien]

So, how long until we discover the mass of the Higgs boson, thus compressing the Earth down to the size of a pea [wikipedia.org]?

Am I reading this wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does it really say "if the information doesn't prove what we want it to, we'll ignore it"?

-"The math alone here is staggering. Somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion collisions will take place each second. Each will leave its mark in the detectors, but the vast majority will be irrelevant to the scientists' goals. Computerized triggers will thus record a specific event only if it matches a predetermined set of conditions, and throw out the rest."

Re:

[vonmeth]

No it does not say that, it says "will thus record a specific event only if it matches a predetermined set of conditions". If you already know about a specific particle or have recorded a similiar 'event' you will have no need to record it as you already know about it. We are trying to discover new particles that we believe to actually be there. In other words, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Why record/keep each piece of straw when you are trying to find a needle?

Re:

[Dunbal]

specifically seeking this set of conditions, and ignoring unknown data that simply doesnt fit, I think that's somewhat biased...

      Yes, it is biased. Imagine you have a bag filled with 100,000,000 marbles. 99,999,999 of them are green. Only one of them is blue. You could swear that you had a blue marble in there. What are you going to do? Empty the sack and ignore all the green marbles until you find the blue one - right?

Re:

[carpeweb]

I was intending to post the same question/observation. My guess is that TFA just didn't write that passage very well.

You can help!

[foreverdisillusioned]

This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home project [web.cern.ch] lets you donate your spare CPU c

Re:You can help!

[Phanatic1a]

The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion.

Huh? You're making that up. Completely making that up. Compute particle energy x number of particles in the loop, it's nothing in macroscopic terms. LHC will be capable of heavy ion collisions at energy levels of 1150 teraelectron volts, which sounds really impressive (and it is, on the quantum scale), but here in the big world that's only one ten-thousandth of a joule.

Re:

[foreverdisillusioned]

Well, I'm paraphrasing an uncited Wikipedia article. Slightly better than making it up, but (possibly) not by much. From the article:

"The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique safety issues. While running, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ, and in the beam, 725 MJ. Loss of only 107 of the beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must discharge an energy equivalent to a considerable quantity of explosives."

Re:

[Phanatic1a]

The energy release if one of the SC magnets quenches is an entirely different matter from what would happen from the beam hitting the wall. Your post conveyed the image of a near-solid beam of ions crashing into the wall of the collider at close-to-c and making a big boom. That doesn't happen, and LHC@home isn't trying to simulate the beam for that reason.

Re:

[trip11]

You forget that during proton acceleration that yes, each atom is accelerated to 7TeV, however there are about a billion protons in per 'bunch' (group of protons that get accelerated together in a tight packet to make colliding with one of them easier). In addition, there are a lot (I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but hundreds-thousands sounds right, of bunches. The number I do remember is that the total energy of the beam is about 350MJ. That is a LOT of energy even on a macroscopi

MOD PARENT DOWN

[foreverdisillusioned]

wtf? So maybe there wouldn't be an actual explosion unless the beam was somehow focused on a single point, but the fact remains the energy output of the beam is NOT trivial, it CAN cause damage to the accelerator wall because the total energy output is "333 MJ per ring" [psu.edu] which is hella more than "only one ten-thousandth of a joule", and in order to avoid damage to the accelerator they have to dump that beam into a graphite block, which apparently must be carefully designed and magnetically shielded to ensur

Before you go rushing in...

[DerekLyons]

This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home [lhcathome.cern.ch] project lets you donate your spare CPU cycles

LHC@home

[burrows]

It may be worth noting that some of the design work on this amazing project was actually done by Slashdot readers with no background in particle accelerators. LHC@home [lhcathome.cern.ch] is a distributed computing project using the SixTrack program that helps simulate particles' travel in the accelerator to study the stability of their orbits. It has been critical data to the scientists that have been working on the project.

Large Hadron Collider

[johansalk]

Interesting, no one in this thread has "misspelt" it yet as the large hardon collider.

Large Hardon Collider

[geneing]

Here you go :)

Who came up with the name like Hadron for the elementary particles? What was s/he thinking?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

parent post: "the large hardon collider." ... located in Bangkok.

Re:

[nacturation]

Which reminds me. I was once in this coffee shop that was like granola central... tons of enviro stuff with the people to match. Anyway, they had this book about trees -- the title was "HARD PINES". It just so happened to be placed upside-down on the shelf. Exercise left for the reader: write "HARD PINES" in all caps onto a sheet of paper and then turn the paper upside-down and read it. Hilarity ensues.
 

Re:

[Shag]

A friend of mine works at the LHC, and I consistently misspell it while chatting with her. She hasn't corrected me yet... but then again, she's the type to say that she'd rather be making love than doing physics. ;)

We need more women like that in science...

Re:

[Paul Crowley]

It's been known... [google.com]

Not very accurate

[parrillada]

From the article:
"The LHC will reach an unprecedented level of energy called the Terascale (a trillion electron volts [...] This is unexplored territory, not only because no laboratory has ever reached this high..."

The Tevatron (the largest particle accelerator in the USA) has a CM evergy of 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). That, incidentally, is where it gets its name: the TEVatron.

Re:

[PatrickThomson]

Individual particles in the tevatron have only 980 GeV of energy, giving a total collision energy of only 2TeV, compared to the LHC's 14. That energy is only for the collision of protons, though, and the LHC can take much more massive nuclei, giving a total of 1,150TeV. Scraping the bottom of the terascale range from 1-2 is not the same as exploring it from 1 TeV to just over 1 PeV.

Well it's a good thing they put it in France...

[Panaflex]

Because if it doesn't work out, they can use it for a mushroom farm...

Superconducting Super Collider

[Mr.Sharpy]

What is unfortunate is that the superconducting super collider, cancelled 13 (!!) years ago, would have had an energy level nearly three times higher than the LHC. Had it not been canceled in favor of the ISS, it would have been completed by now and working to answer the questions of the universe. The U.S. is losing (already lost?) its edge.

Blue Sky Research

[Doc Ruby]

They've got a machine to smash cesium, the largest atom [google.com]? No wonder it's taking so long to smash such a large particle.

Speculative Idea for a Spaceborne Collider...

[QuantumFTL]

IANAP (though I do have a BS in Physics), but I've been tossing this idea around for a few years and thought I'd share with slashdot:

Cosmic rays contain energies up to 10^20 eV (source: Oh-My-God Particle [wikipedia.org]) whereas the LHC will only have an available energy of 10^13 eV (14 TeV, source: LHC [wikipedia.org]). It seems to me that 10 million times higher energy will be difficult to achieve (read: impossible without at least Type I Civilization [wikipedia.org] level technology). What if we could, instead, harness the power of these freely

Still...

[xlsior]

There's an awful lot of mentions of "probably" and shouldn't in these theories.

Who actually got the final say that these potential risks were indeed deemed acceptable? I mean, if you are wrong in a case like this, an "I'm sorry" hallmark wouldn't quite cover it...

Re:

[mritunjai]

...And you probably stumbled on the reason why they're called "theories". Do look up dictionary meaning of theory sometime.

There are distinct classes of such, um, 'stuff' in science -

1. Hypothesis: I saw an apple fall from a tree. Ergo, I hypothesize an attractive force in earth which pulls all bodies towards it.

2. Theory: According to all 'known' results and 'known' observations, it was found that all objects pull other objects with an attractive force which is neither magnetic or electric in nature. This

Futurama

[Digital Vomit]

"So I said, 'Supercollider? I barely know her!
... Then they built the supercollider.'"

Re:

[stox]

The HEP community was one of the first large scale users of Linux. Bob Young, of RedHat fame, even credits Fermilab for some of the earliest momentum in the adoption of Linux by "serious" users.

Re:

[Tim C]

Why do we need to know what happened at the beginning of the universe? It has no bearing on our lives at all.

Prove it. Prove that the physics that we learn doing such experiments will have no bearing on our lives.

For years, you could say the same thing about quantum mechanics; now, there are increasing numbers of devices that rely on quantum mechanical effects for their operation (see, eg, superconducting quantum interference devices [wikipedia.org]). Also, as I love to remind people in this sort of situation, the laser wa

Re:

[Pictor1973]

The Fermilab Tevatron is currently the largest (6.28 Km in circumference) and highest-energy (about 1/7th of the LHC) running accelerator on earth. It will be second when LHC will get up to speed. Size wise LEP (which used to sit where the LHC is being built) detains the record as the largest accelerator with a 26.6 Km circumference (the same that the LHC will have). Oh another interesting fact: these devices often need to keep their magnets pretty cold (colder than outer space!) and use the la largest refr [airliquide.com]

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

Interesting you should say that, because every time I read about a random number generator based on a "true random" phenomenon like radioactive decay (quantum-electrodynamic effects, whatever), I think "What if that's not truly random?" I really wouldn't be surprised if, one day, somebody discovered a system to it.

While on the topic, the other day, I discovered a truly marvelous pseudorandom number generator that this margin is large enough to contain:

uint32_t deadbeef_rand() {
deadbeef_seed

Re:

[Prof.Phreak]

I really wouldn't be surprised if, one day, somebody discovered a system to it.

Nah. Some of those things are provably uncomputable...yet you get numbers out of them. Thus, they're `random' as far as computability is concerned... There -may- well be system to it, but that system won't be computable---so it's not of much use to predict things---thus, it's ``trully random'' (though I do see your point of not knowing the things we don't know, etc.)