One of the Coolest Places In the Universe 338
phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."
Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think a large hardon collider is for?
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
We don't wonder. We know why!
Re:Higgs Bussom? (Score:5, Funny)
Could have used a cold spoon (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you haven't heard about cold and shrinkage then.
Can someone code up a clock? (Score:2)
A countdown clock to when they fire that thing up? One that works in both Linux and Windows?
Or explain how another program can be used for that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming that the LHC will destroy the Earth, this countdown is also the number of days left to lose your virginity.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:4, Funny)
And don't forget to include the theme from "2001: A Space Odyssey" Also Sprach Zarathustra
Also appropriate, Is Zarathustra in your pocket or are you just happy to see the LHC going online?
Also appropriate since we might see the birth of another solar system where the LHC used to be.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Can someone code up a clock? (Score:4, Funny)
Here's a calendar [globalartistvillage.org] designed to show when the LHC comes online and does its first experiment.
Coolest place looking for the hottest bang? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Mal-2
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumb headline looking for press release (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not that impressive at all. If you read the article, they are cooling the superconducting magnets with liquid helium. (Nearly?) every university chemistry department will have an NMR spectrometer with a superconducting magnet doing at the same temperature, and many will have a SQUID going colder. So although it is *one* of the coldest places on earth, it is a fairly routine temperature.
Re:Coolest place looking for the hottest bang? (Score:5, Funny)
One of my little sisterâ(TM)s friends told her in serious horror that âoethe scientistsâ were going to destroy the earth with this device.
Talk about dumb! Doesn't she realize it's not just the Earth, but the entire Universe that is on the line here?!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Have we gone below 42 Kelvin yet?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Not just Joe Sixpack, but anybody who doesn't care much about the experiment at this point. It's like listening to Joe Sixpack's plans for a rock climbing trip... tell me all the details after something interesting has happened.
Dark Knight sequel? (Score:5, Funny)
Trying to discover a hypothetical elementary particle, or trying to create Batman's next villain [youtube.com]?!
They're still searching? (Score:3, Funny)
Have they checked behind the couch?
Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Tongue contact with cold collider parts can result in serious injury.
Re:Warning! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Replying to undo wrong moderation - I clicked the wrong option and it was applied before I could stop it. Stupid auto-save system...
Re:Warning! (Score:4, Funny)
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to the Large Hadron Collider.
Caution: The Large Hadron Collider may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
The Large Hadron Collider contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use the Large Hadron Collider on concrete.
Discontinue use of the Large Hadron Collider if any of the following occurs:
* itching
* vertigo
* dizziness
* tingling in extremities
* loss of balance or coordination
* slurred speech
* temporary blindness
* profuse sweating
* or heart palpitations.
If the Large Hadron Collider begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
The Large Hadron Collider may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, the Large Hadron Collider should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration. Failure to do so relieves the makers of the Large Hadron Collider, the scientific community, and its parent company, the military-industrial complex, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of the Large Hadron Collider include an unknown glowing green substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
The Large Hadron Collider has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt the Large Hadron Collider.
The Large Hadron Collider comes with a lifetime warranty.
Re: (Score:2)
I double-dog dare you!
Re: (Score:2)
Don't eat the Large Hadron Collider.
Curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
And are they really going to push the magnetic fields up to the point where they truly need to cool high-temp superconductors down to the edge of absolute zero? TFA says they're using enormous currents, but doesn't this leave an awful small margin?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If the magnets are superconducting, why would they need a good thermal conductor? It's not as if superconductors generate any heat in operation.
That's an excellent question. I'm guessing they are not using HTC superconductors, which can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, due to the potential for current-induced superconductivity breakdown.
Here's a little background on the effect (Thank you Wikipedia...)
This equation, which is known as the London equation, predicts that the magnetic field in a superc
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
No. Superconductors generate exactly ZERO ohmic heating when current passes through them.
Not "some", but absolutely ZERO heating.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Spontaneous fluctations in magnitude of more than several degrees are HIGHLY improbable (as in "unlikely to happen during the Universe's lifetime").
However, different equipment failures can happen. That's why cables are cooled slightly below the boiling point of helium. Which itself is well below the critical temperature for Nb-Ti and Nb superconductors.
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. ANY superconductor has zero resistance. That's actually a part of definition for a superconductor.
Even high-temperature ones (with some caveats near critical temperature and in strong magnetic fields) have zero resistance.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I did say "with some caveats in strong magnetic fields" :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
No - in any superconductor above absolute zero, there will be some thermal noise that locally (albeit on a very small scale) interferes with the current and creates some resistance.
It's a small effect, but when dealing with high currents (as CERN are), the colder you get the magnets the better.
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
No. One more time: there's NO resistance. In one experiment, for example, there were no measurable current decrease in a magnet after 20 years.
Low-TC superconductors are preferable because they have much higher critical current. Superconductors lose their superconductivity when a high enough magnetic field is applied. This magnetic field can be external or generated by the current passing through the superconductor itself.
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
Re:Curious... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and 1.9K temperature is used because it has a margin of safety for liquid helium (which has 4K boiling point).
1.9 K is below the so-called "lambda point" of helium, which stands at 2.2 K. That point corresponds to a transition to the superfluid state. This may help with heat dissipation in this setup.
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Funny)
So, how much resistance is there in a Superconductor? A tiny bit?
Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
When they create a black hole and destroy the earth, they can say "but it was such a cool experiment..."
Actually, they can't.
Unless they synchronize the destruction with a space tourism trip.
...
Everybody! Start checking for suspicious space flights!
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, they can't.
Unless they synchronize the destruction with a space tourism trip.
...
Everybody! Start checking for suspicious space flights!
I heard every single one of the bastards has a towel and an electronic thumb all prepared.
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:4, Funny)
Well it would effectively put an end to the vast majority of our problems, replacing them with a single massive problem.
Re: (Score:2)
replacing them with a single massive problem.
I dunno... wouldn't an Earth-mass black hole be very small?
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:4, Informative)
Its Schwarzchild radius would be a few cm. Although it would exert a force of 1 g if you were one Earth radius away (6000 km) but if we manage to make an Earth-weight black hole it will be a triumph of miniaturization. We will have succeeded in finally making a black hole small enough to fit in your pocket.
Re: (Score:2)
Cue 'Is that a black hole in you pocket...' jokes.
Re:Ah now I see... (Score:5, Funny)
Har-de-har-har!
I mod myself down for that one.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
It'll never happen at CERN, but wait till the Japanese get involved...
Re: (Score:2)
When they create a black hole and destroy the earth, they can say "but it was such a cool experiment..."
Ah, but they have assured us that that almost certainly probably won't happen.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It just puts into perspective that there needs to be a risk benefit standard. Now if they said there was a one in a million chance of making a black hole the size of a basketball then I'd be saying it wasn't worth the risk.
As a reasonably modern person you would expect to benefit from advances made by research into physics. That is why the risk might be acceptable to you. Somebody who has a different lifestyle might have a different perspective on this.
there's that chance says that there is zero chance of it lasting more than a few milliseconds.
Nobody really knows what happens to microscopic black holes. There is no experimental evidence.
Bring it on (Score:5, Funny)
We are doom, this being a type 13 planet (Score:3, Interesting)
Infinitely Improbable (Score:5, Funny)
The collider is so cool you could keep a side of meat in it for a month. It is so incredibly hip it has trouble seeing over its own pelvis. Hey, you sass that hoopy large hadron collider, there's a frood that really knows where its towel's at.
silly question concerning microwave background (Score:2, Interesting)
So whatever the cooling mechanism is removes heat from the volume faster than the microwave background heats it up?
Higgs Boson? (Score:2, Funny)
I would have assumed that something this cool would be used to search for the elusive Fonz Particle.
obligatory bash.org quote (Score:5, Funny)
[TheXPhial] vaccuums
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
[TheXPhial] black holes
[Guo_Si] Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
[TheXPhial] lava?
uneconomic (Score:5, Funny)
Have you seen the cost of this large hagrid colliding thing? What is the point of wasting all that tax money looking for that higgs boson that, when found, will probably have been stepped on or at least be all dirty. Wouldn't it make more sense just to write the boson off at the next inventory count and just requisition a NEW higgs boson from stores?
Okay, we need to be more environmentally aware now, and less wasteful of materials but this just confirms what people have told me about these CERN guys; they just take stuff to extremes.
maybe (Score:2)
it doesn't exist.
Light and mass question for experts (Score:2)
Why does light stop accelerating at 186,000 miles per second?
Does that everything in the universe has some mass?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
light does not stop accelerating at 186,000 mps, it travels at 186,000 mps (well... approximately) in a vacuum. it does not accelerate, it travels at a constant speed (as far as we know), so c is a constant. Now it does slow down as it travels through a medium (water, air, crystal), but mostly that is caused by the absorption and re-emmitance (is that a word?) of the photons.
Re: (Score:2)
Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permittivity [wikipedia.org] and search for related material on the electromagnetic properties of space.
Re: (Score:2)
Therefore it speeds up (ahem, accelerates) when it comes back out.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on your point of view. The *apparent* speed of light (group velocity - that is, the speed of wave propagation) in a medium is variable, but individual photons have zero mass, thus *can not* experience acceleration. In terms of basic classical physics, a=F/m, m is 0 - division by zero, the equation is unsolvable, i.e. the concept simply does not apply.
Just read the headline... (Score:2)
One of the coolest? (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone know the coldest place in the universe?
Please don't say Cheney's heart...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Right, the correct answer is the cold void where Cheney's heart used to be.
This assumes the big bang is correct. (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was growing up (Score:4, Funny)
When I was growing up, we had to get by on a few millikelvins, and we were grateful for every last one of them!
Re:When I was growing up (Score:4, Funny)
Re:When I was growing up (Score:5, Funny)
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
Paradise. Why, when I was growin' up, we were all huddled together inside a higgs boson in the middle of a black hole. Every morning, we'd lick the black hole clean with our tongues, then huddle around the event horizon rubbing our hands together until it went *above* absolute zero.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:!news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.
Liquid helium temperatures are nothing new.
Off of the top of my head, CEBAF (1.4km), Tevatron (6.3km), RHIC (3.8km), and most NMR equipment use liquid helium to cool their low-temperatre superconducting components.
The canceled Superconducting Supercollider would have been 87km long, and have been cooled by liquid helium, had congress not pulled the plug.
Extending the technology to 27km simply requires a bigger investment. That doesn't make it any less impressive, though many of the other engineering aspect
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:!news (Score:4, Funny)
so what the fuck?
Sensory overload. I think I melded that story and the previous with the packaging world record...oh wait, there's something happening on my other monitor, can't talk.
Re:I thought.... (Score:5, Informative)
Because its not being built by Americans. It's being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research, A.K.A. 'CERN [wikipedia.org]' (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire). Thats why its not in the USA, and why its in France.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-hep.phys.cmu.edu/cms/PICT_ARCH/lhc_map.gif [cmu.edu]
Its about 90% under France.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Your own quote clearly says it's in both.
Re: (Score:2)
Because, you arrogant little fart, *you* (referring both to your country as a whole and to you personally) are not building it.
Re:I thought.... (Score:5, Funny)
Could you please point me to the American supersonic jetliner?
Thought not - and seeing as how it was bits falling of a US plane that caused the disaster that killed off Concorde, you've got nothing to shout about.
Concorde was an elementally flawed idea - too small and too expensive to develop and run, but I saw the A380 at Farnborough the other day, and that's going to kill Boeing in the next few years, especially if they lose the USAF tanker contract too.
And 'super-massive supercollider'?
That's just a drag strip with 2 SUVs loaded with lard-arsed Yanks playing chicken :o)
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another example of useless science journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.
Now tell me, what do you think a reader without any scientific knowledge will take away from this article, that the scale of the cooling is what makes it challenging, or the temperature itself? That 1.9 K is an exotically low temperature for physics experiments, or that it's mundane? This is what bothers me about most science journalism. The misleading statements and lack of information.
Come to think of it, that's the problem with most non-science journalism too.
Re: (Score:2)
Andy
Re: (Score:2)
> Honestly, it's embarrassing to see such
> ridiculous articles
IIRC... the LHC is almost 17 miles around.. how big is a BEC experiment? How big is an MRI machine?
I'm still impressed with the low temps achieved.
Re: (Score:2)
From Wikipedia: "it is possible that some molecules reach a state of no kinetic energy while others have more kinetic energy than the measured energy. Since the average between the lower and higher measurements give us the temperature we read, it is quite possible for some molecules to reach zero Kelvin."
Yes, it is possible for things to be colder, like in the above extreme example of molecules with no kinetic energy. I think the novel part of the Large Hadron Collider is its scale. Bringing something this
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
First thing I read was "Hardon Collider"
Muahaha! I can't believe no one made that joke before!
Oh wait..
Re:CERN spin off technologies (Score:5, Informative)
Health and medicine
Transportation
Public safety
Consumer, home, and recreation
Environmental and agricultural resources
Computer technology
Industrial productivity
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cataclysmic? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't mod the comment "Troll", and I don't consider it so. You cannot moderate and comment in the same thread - when you comment, your mods are cancelled.
As for burying it, how else in Europe are you going to build something 27 km across and dead level, with mounting points for thousands of tons of equipment? It is not below a mountain, it is below farmland. Anywhere reasonably flat in Europe is covered with towns and villages and criss-crossed with roads. And the flatness requirement is *exact*, so if the ground is only fairly flat, you will have to have bits in tunnels and/or on stilts anyway. On stilts is bad for carrying heavy loads. And you don't want your hypersensitive particle detectors triggered by cosmic radiation, so they will have to be heavily shielded anyway. Since the equipment needs to be well protected from accidents and weather for purely engineering reasons (big magnets, huge currents, super-cooling, vacuum). I could see problems with those magnets distorting every CRT-based television for hundreds of yards. The reason for burying it is purely for experimental purposes rather than safety. It is re-using the tunnel dug for an earlier detector, decommissioned a few years ago.