LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts 305
The LHC has become the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, weighing in at over one trillion electron volts. "Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts. On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this 'pilot beam,' reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT. The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001. The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts."
WOW! (Score:1, Funny)
With One Trillion Election Votes, he's a shoe in!
Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they know how to conduct themselves this time around.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Funny)
If only.... (Score:5, Funny)
now we could feed THAT into a flux capacitor.....
There's something very important (Score:3, Funny)
I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the streams... It would be bad...
Re:When will the science begin (Score:3, Funny)
Science isn't about instant gratification.
Not a sperm donor, I take it.
No Science? (Score:4, Funny)
They say that no science has been done yet, but now we know that 1.18 TeV is below the energy level at which higgs bosons travel back in time to disrupt supercollider experiments.
(Yes, I'm kidding.)
Mass, not time (Score:5, Funny)
Let me honor /. tradition and use a car analogy here:
If you smash 2 GM Metros together, you CANNOT put together 2 Grand Marquis from the debris - there just isn't enough metal.
However, if you smash 2 Peterbuilts together, you can, at least in theory, put together 2 Grand Marquis from that debris - there's enough metal.
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When you smash particles together, there has to be enough mass-energy (enough metal) to form the particles you are looking for, or they won't appear. Mass is energy, energy is mass, speed is kinetic energy, and thus mass.
The Higgs is somewhere north of 1TeV - how much north of that varies from theory to theory. If the Higgs is a Grand Marquis, right now, the Tevatron and the LHC are smashing together Tauruses. Soon, the LHC will be up to stretch limos. At full power, the LHC will be at the Hummer3 level.
And cosmic rays are at the freight train level, but since that's not happening in the lab, it does no good: what fun is a collision if nobody caught it on video?
Re:Translation into sensible units (Score:4, Funny)
Re:When will the science begin (Score:5, Funny)
That's self gratification, not instant gratification. Although I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that last part...
Re:Question about particle accelerators (Score:3, Funny)
>Thanks for the response! Not to sound like a 3 year old, but why? Wouldn't length contraction cancel out the effects of time dilation?
Don't know about you, but I'll be pretty happy and surprised if my nephew is going to ask similar questions when he turns 3.
Re:Shocking (Score:3, Funny)
No. Now it's time for them to amp things up!
This looks serious (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mass, not time (Score:3, Funny)
So what you're saying is that we could create 2 Grand Marquis if we accelerated 2 mini-Coopers to high enough speeds?
1.18 billion volts... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mass, not time (Score:3, Funny)
I don't think you could get mini's going fast enough even if you dumped one of them out of a plane. I seem to remember something like this on mythbusters.
Re:Shocking (Score:3, Funny)
Children's song of the future... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:When will the science begin (Score:3, Funny)
"When does the Science ever begin with a particle accelerator project? "
The same time it always does: When the lead physicist steps into the acceleration chamber... and vanishes.
Oh boy.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:4, Funny)
Have you seen inside an "adult shop" recently? Looks that way.
Besides, whatever it takes to get teenagers into science is fine with me.
Re:Shocking (Score:2, Funny)
Watt an awful pun-thread this has become.
Re:Shocking (Score:3, Funny)
Mod parent up, that one was a joule.
Re:When will the science begin (Score:2, Funny)
According to Wikipedia that's equivalent to the kinetic energy of 7 flying mosquitoes.
In the UK we've gone over to the metric system - how many wasps is this?
Re:When will the science begin (Score:2, Funny)
(...)extremely disappointing to the rest of the world who can't fathom why something so expensive, with such a long development time...still has not provided any research.
There a Duke Nukem Forever joke in there somewhere...