Awesome Pics of CERN's Large Hadron Collider 249
mactard submitted a collection of insanely beautiful pictures of the Large Hadron Collider. I've always had a warm place for amazing photgraphs, and these really don't disappoint. Science really is beautiful sometimes.
Re:3rd photo (Score:5, Interesting)
Impressive (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never seen such a complex array of technology outside a Hollywood or video game mock-up. It must be very exciting for the folks on the design team to see this coming together.
And kudos to the photographer(s) who captured these. That was a smart move, collecting such high-res images.
Very nice.
Re:3rd photo (Score:3, Interesting)
Truth is stranger than fiction...
Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project [wikipedia.org] -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either.
Re:3rd photo (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the most impressive thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I was thinking the same thing. Could this be the most complex device ever assembled by humankind? Just the diagnostics and debugging seems way beyond daunting.
Dates? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Arise! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Holy Shit! (Score:2, Interesting)
It took several billion Euros to build the LHC. This is a beautiful picture of the servers that control and manage it. [boston.com] Does anyone else find it odd that they couldn't get a flat screen monitor?
Re:the most impressive thing (Score:3, Interesting)
And what about reproducibility?.
It would be rather hard too say "Oh yeah, I confirmed that experiment in my laboratory". If something would be wrong wired and thereby giving some false positives, how do you test for those? They must have some redundant checking mechanism somewhere...
Re:I wanted to try and find (Score:3, Interesting)
You just reminded me of an LHC fact my professor told me a year or so ago: when lake geneva is particularly full, the *country* bends enough that CERN have to take it into account. It's just that sensitive.
Not quite... (Score:3, Interesting)
According to Wikipedia, 95% confidence interval is 114 to 140 GeV/c2.
That is if you fit it to the Standard Model. Since we have no idea if the SM holds to LHC energies you cannot really believe that as a real bound. In fact, if we measure the Higgs at 200GeV/c2 my guess is that we'd revisit some of the input measurements and find that the result is probably not as inconsistent as we originally thought i.e. take these limits with a LARGE grain of salt, they depend on a lot of different, complex measurements all being correct.
What is far more certain is that we have to see something before 1TeV. At around this energy the probability of two W bosons scattering becomes greater than 100% without a Higgs present. Since any theory which gives a bigger than 100% probability of an event has got to be wrong there are only two possibilities:
This is one reason why the LHC is so exciting: we HAVE to see something. Either a Higgs boson, or hopefully something entirely different.
Re:3rd photo (Score:3, Interesting)
"Turns out, the government really did have a Stargate Project [wikipedia.org] -- it was just about psychics, not aliens. And they didn't find any. Of either."
Actually they did. You might want to read Mind-Reach, the 1977 original book about SCANATE, the SRI project that later became GRILL FLAME then was closed (at least officially) by the CIA under the name STAR GATE. Some of their 'hits' detailed in this book are pretty darn impressive.
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Reach-Scientists-Psychic-Abilities-Consciousness/dp/1571744142/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217800041&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
The tricky thing about remote viewing is not that it doesn't work, but that it's hard to separate the 'signal' from the 'noise'.
And of course, the results are incompatible with assumptions made by some of our fundamental physical theories. Whatever information channel ESP uses, it does not appear to obey the inverse square law or respect light cones, so it's not EM-based. This makes it difficult to figure out how to maximise the effect, since we don't have a good mathematical model for how it works. Some scientists (or science-believing people, as opposed to active researchers) are uncomfortable with admitting this kind of uncertainty into their personal models of the universe. It's a lot easier to believe that we really do understand how the universe works than to realise that actually, we only understand parts of it and our working assumptions may need to be rethought.
But when you get significant results that contradict theory, it's the theory that should change, if you're doing science.
See also http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]
and http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217801555&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]
for some very recent books detailing the experimental support for the reality of ESP.