On Wednesday, the Large Hadron Collider machine willl be switched on and will hopefully recreate the following seconds after the Big Bang. Based in Geneva, Switzerland the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher at CERN has 6,000 superconducting magnets to steer the proton beams travelling at the speed of light around its 27-kilometre particle race track. Electronic detectors the size of churches observe new matter created inside the machine, and a hundred thousand computers around the world are standing by to analyse all the data.

Many people have protested about this, saying it will be the end of the world.

Please discuss.

On Wednesday, the Large Hadron Collider machine willl be switched on and will hopefully recreate the following seconds after the Big Bang. Based in Geneva, Switzerland the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher at CERN has 6,000 superconducting magnets to steer the proton beams travelling at the speed of light around its 27-kilometre particle race track. Electronic detectors the size of churches observe new matter created inside the machine, and a hundred thousand computers around the world are standing by to analyse all the data.

Many people have protested about this, saying it will be the end of the world.

Please discuss.
so this has never been done before and they can't accurately predict the results, and some think the results could be catastrophic?  I can hardly wait  ::) 

so this has never been done before and they can't accurately predict the results, and some think the results could be catastrophic?  I can hardly wait   ::) 
If all this does go wrong, have can we blame them for the end of the world?

If all this does go wrong, have can we blame them for the end of the world?
it can't go wrong, or at least it won't be the end of the world.    it's not 2012 yet  ::)

Please discuss.


Serious:  Every couple of years, cosmic rays show up with particles way more massive than anything than the ones that can be produced in the LHC.  If there were a real risk, we'd have ceased to exist millions (if not billions) of years ago.  Weighing in at 1020 eV, the Oh My God Particle is one such example of a naturally-produced particle that's 100,000 times as energetic/massive as the LHC's most energetic/heaviest conceivable output, and around 10 million times more energetic than most of the collisions it'll be working with.

"So if nature produces things so awesomely massive, why don't we just use them instead of building colossal atom-smashers", I hear you ask.

Good question!  But the problem with waiting for things like the OMG particle is that they get spewed out randomly by gamma-ray bursts, hypernovae, or more likely, accelerated by the hypermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and since we haven't even figured out where they come from, let alone how to produce them ourselves nor how to predict their apperances, we can't replicate such events for study.  We can only wait for one or two such particles per decade, and make educated guesses after the fact.  That's "interesting", but not particularly helpful.  The LHC's designed to be able to produce much lower-energy particles, but it's designed to do so repeatably, with the expectation that we'll have a collision sufficiently energetic to produce proof of the Higgs boson (heavier than anything we've synthesized before, but much lighter than the weird things nature throws our way every now and then) within the first few days/weeks of operation, and confirmation not too long thereafter.  (Either that, or the Higgs doesn't exist, and we go back to the drawing board and reinvent physics...  Either way, we learn something! ) 

The LHC will collide protons at around 14 TeV (1.4 * 1013, or 1.4 trillion electron volts) and if you want to talk about the peak energies of the ALICE lead ion collision experiment (slamming lead ions into each other, and/or protons into lead ions with peak energies in the range of 1150 TeV, or 1.15 * 1015 1.15 quadrillion electron volts), are by far the most energetic produced by man, but the OMG Particle was a natural occurrence, and it was 100,000 times as massive/energetic (1020 eV) than anything we can create at the LHC.  That's pretty incredible - about the energy released by a mosquito ramming into a window at full tilt.  The difference being that the mosquito is made of trillions of atoms, and the LHC's doing it with one atom. 

But since nature throws stuff at us so hard that every few years, a proton (that OMG particle again) shows up with kinetic energy of a baseball.  We're not sure where these things come from; about the only thing we know of would be the jets powered by the magnetic fields and accretion disks near the million-solar-mass black holes at the center of active galactic nuclei.  As for the LHC, given that we've survived 4.6 billion years of nature throwing particles 100,000 times as massive at us every few years, the risk is effectively zero. 


so this has never been done before and they can't accurately predict the results, and some think the results could be catastrophic?  I can hardly wait  ::) 


Nope, this has never been done before.  No, we can't accurately predict the results.  Yes, some think the results could be catastrophic.  But the missing piece (which I've filled in -- nature throws things at us that are 100,000 times as powerful as anything the LHC can possibly create), and it does so at least every few years, and probably much more frequently than that. 

As Brian Cox of Manchester University puts it, "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---.".  Since he's British and I'm not, I can suggest replacing his three dashes with "wat".

If we're talkin' Meat Loaf, two outa three ain't bad.  But in science, even three outa four ain't enough.  I'll use a word stronger than the one Dr. Cox used:  The people who think the results could be catastrophic are wrong, and "wrong" is not a word that I use lightly in matters politics, let alone science. 

The serious stuff out of the way, it's time for the awesome stuff.

Namely the Large Hadron Rap, with MP3 and video by AlpineKat and Will Barras, and featuring the voice synthesizer of MC Hawking.  If you made it through my butchery of particle physics, you've earned the right to some nerdcore, especially since the nerdcore rap explains it about as well as I did, and has a much funkier backbeat.

For a second, I thought that said Large Hardon Collider.  I was like "Large Hardon?  Switched on?  BIG BANG?  I don't think I like the sound of that" LOL

On a seriouis note, these "skeptics" who think it will be the end of the world are off their rocker

I read about this in this morning's paper. It seems a little scary to me. Yeah, I understand that they are trying to prove/disprove a theory which is all good but there has been many things that the science community had created that proved more harmful than good. The atomic/hydrogen bomb, anyone?



Cat 

I read about this in this morning's paper. It seems a little scary to me. Yeah, I understand that they are trying to prove/disprove a theory which is all good but there has been many things that the science community had created that proved more harmful than good. The atomic/hydrogen bomb, anyone?


If the atomic bomb is what we've gotta have in order to have nuclear power, MRIs, PET scans, and radiotherapy... I'll stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

I like my microwave oven, weather radar, and air traffic control radars.  I'll take my chances with the "pain ray" active denial system. 

Ditto for the Laserdisc, the CD, the DVD, Blu-Ray, LASIK, laser dentistry, and laser scalpels used in laparascopic surgery.  I'll take my chances with a 747 with a big-ass chemical laser in it.

Ditto for the rockets that launch the satellites that give me GPS, satellite TV/radio, and the Hubble Space Telescope, even if we had to invent the ICBM (and in the case of Hubble, the spy satellite) first.

The Bomb's actually an outlier -- most of the time, the military applications may be the first thing we think of, but they're actually the hardest things to build, and they're often less effective than the technology they're trying to replace.  The defensive version of the rocket is the satellite launch platform, and spy satellites and GPS have won (either by preventing the war in the first place) at lot more wars than their offensive counterparts, in the form of the ICBM.

in the end it will be "Much Adue About Nothing"

Be patient.God will bring the Comet!

Stop Drop & Roll

Pay No Attention to The Man behind The Curtain

I Need a Government Funding for a pot study!!!!

It amazes me how much money can go into useless projects.......What possible benefit is this particle study
going to do for our everyday lives.......Will it get better reception on HBO?

Can I suggest you read this?  Specifically the first question


I read it, but as for the first question, I really couldn't come up with a better explanation than the one provided. 

Aristotle tried to do science without experimentation.  It beat the heck out of pure mysticism, but humanity spent centuries thinking there were only four elements.  Fail.  If it can't be backed up by experiment, it can't truly be considered science.

As for future technologies in the 100-year timeframe, I can only point to history as my guideline. 

200 years ago, electromagnetism was little more than a way to do parlor tricks -- if you put a copper and a zinc bar into a solution of salt, connect them with a wire wrapped around an iron bar, you can make a tiny magnetic compass needle spin.  And if you got rid of the salt bath, and just used another wire wrapped around another iron bar, you could do the same thing, just by waving the second wire-wrapped iron bar over a big enough magnet.  All very cute, but in an age of steam, what's that really useful for?  100 years ago, it made the leap from laboratory to commercial product. 

So now I have my power supply.

100 years ago, a bunch of guys who knew a bunch about electricity were trying to figure out why light and electricity didn't work the way classical physics said it oughta.  It turns out the math works, but only if you assume that classical physics doesn't work, and that electrons can only exist in certain numbered (or "quantized") states.  One of 'em looked into the photoelectric effect.  Others invented the vaccuum tube.  Others figured out that you could do the same thing with a hunk of germanium.  100 (in the case of the germanium, around 50, but the author already covered the invention of the transistor on the web page you linked to) years from that era, almost everything used to make this post (the semiconductors in the CPU, the lasers in the fiber-optics, the wavelengths of light emitted by the CRT display I'm using) is reliant upon the application of physics that wouldn't work unless we supplanted classical physics with quantum physics.  We developed the atomic bomb, but we also developed atomic power.  Enough fuel to power a city for a year, in the palm of your hand.

And I can make this silly post on an Internet message board.

I have no idea what we'll build based on what we discover at the LHC, and I probably won't live to see it turned into a useful product.  The 21st-century equivalent of "parlor tricks" could range from fiddling with gravity to being able to catalyze the decay of radioactive materials.  As with the exploitation of electromagnetism to electrify the planet, and the exploitation of quantum theory to computerize it, the reality will probably be something less fun than the "make compasses read wrong!" and "make things glow in different colors!" parlor tricks of the past two centuries, but infinitely more useful.  (Practical antigravity?  Turning low-level nuclear waste into heat energy without a weapons proliferation risk?  Powering spaceships with either or both option, leading to asteroid mining/colonization and the end of the resource constraints imposed by a finite Earth?)  But most likely, something completely different and not yet imagined by anyone. 

In the meantime, karma for keeping the thread up to date on the actual science.

To recap the past 48 hours, the LHC's basically on a shakedown cruise.  Yesterday's run was to make sure the magnets all worked and that a complete circuit could be made, and now it's time to make sure the detectors all work as predicted, and so on.  It'll be about a month before the first collisions take place, and it'll be a few months to a year after that before they're running at full power.  The Higgs should be detected sometime before that, but what'll be interesting is at what mass, and what else we find while we look for it.


Do we know if we have been sucked into a big black hole?


No, but you can keep checking on [url=http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/this website.  For a good time, view the HTML source!

uhh... I think we've been sucked into a big black hole. 



I'd rather suck a big black hole rather than be sucked INTO one. ;D ;)

If you subscribe to the whole “Big Bang” thing, then there was a point in the past in which every atom in the universe was condensed into a singularity. Which means everything, even you and that bastard Bob Feeney, are quantumly entangled. Some scientists have even gone so far as to claim that quantum entanglement shows that there is no such thing as space, and that everything in the universe is still touching. Space is just an illusion created by our flawed perceptions, and we’re all one. The hippies were right after all.

Level Of Mind Blowing-ness: A fistful of acid tabs followed by the flume ride at Disneyworld.