cactus flower wrote:

Link to illustrated Cern update -here!

This is a great little 2 minute animation of the Cern LHC and also the worlwide computer grid.

Still wondering if the digging up of the main mediterranean internet cables last year upset this operation at all. Does anyone know if Fermilab owns a sub ?

I don't buy your competition from Fermilab theory - I'd say they'd be making a lot more noise about it if they needed to.. the End of the World is usually a good show stopper... Although they have to be careful about making that kind of noise because if they get their own machine going then they'll have to justify that too. "We have better fire extinguishers in the event of baby black holes getting out of hand"

The Americans are happy that it's happening in Europe - they'll be one of the last to go anyway...

Auditor #9 wrote:

I don't buy your competition from Fermilab theory - I'd say they'd be making a lot more noise about it if they needed to.. the End of the World is usually a good show stopper... Although they have to be careful about making that kind of noise because if they get their own machine going then they'll have to justify that too. "We have better fire extinguishers in the event of baby black holes getting out of hand"

The Americans are happy that it's happening in Europe - they'll be one of the last to go anyway...

Not my Fermilab theory but Labunleashed ( great blog, link on previous page ). But just thought it would just be so neat to tie these two threads together (Cern and Web Outage) in one parcel that would drive the unworried and unworryable crazy

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=22936

The Cern project continues - any news, anyone?

This is the updated Wikipaedia summary:

Quote :

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is in the final stages of construction and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to their final operating temperature of approximately 2K. The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later.[1] The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.[2] The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.[3][2] The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches[4] are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.[5]

Well, the powers at Cern took my safety concerns seriously enough to commission a report - here is the outcome: http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1026328

So, have they not plugged in the black hole machine yet ?

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

Oh. I that that was the Lisbon Hadron Collider.

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

France and Germany, under enhanced co-operation decided to enter the Event Horizon to create an alternate reality in which the Irish actually voted Yes.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

Oh. I that that was the Lisbon Hadron Collider.

I thought it was the Large Moron Collider. Were they using Helium3 atoms to bash against one another ?

Have they found the Higgins bosos yet ?

Don't be insulting our members Audi.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Don't be insulting our members Audi.

C'mon I was just trying to make ibis feel better - I'm on their side ! I swear !

I'll go off now and find a real link now to some real news about the LHC ...

What if they don't find the Higgs boson ? Does that mean that EVERYTHING was wrong and they have to go back to the drawing board and make a new one?

The thing that gives things their 'thingness' as opposed to ??
http://www.wm.edu/news/index.php?id=8995

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

France and Germany, under enhanced co-operation decided to enter the Event Horizon to create an alternate reality in which the Irish actually voted Yes.

This will be achieved by smashing the Irish voter together with reality at increasingly high speeds until the right outcome results...

ibis wrote:

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

France and Germany, under enhanced co-operation decided to enter the Event Horizon to create an alternate reality in which the Irish actually voted Yes.

This will be achieved by smashing the Irish voter together with reality at increasingly high speeds until the right outcome results...

Don't they believe they might find a magnetic monopole ? That is a unit of charge without its balancing opposite... They'll keep bashing away until they get out what best fits their theories - Yes votes, quarks etc.

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

What was all scaremongering?

cactus flower wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

What was all scaremongering?

The black hole.
And there was me getting all prepared to record it on Sky News.

I work at times on quite big projects in which there are risks. There are elaborate risk assessment procedures that rightly have to be complied with before deciding whether to go ahead. It seems to me from the reports that there are inadequate controls on outfits like Cern and that risk assessement has been skimped on. Was an EIS required ? EIS would be required for a smallish landfill site for example. I think a lot of the laughter about safety concerns over Cern is either slightly nervous or based on even less knowledge of the physics than I have ( if that is possible ). Cern appear to have had to backtrack somewhat and carry out some kind of additional assessment. Whether it was for real, or lip service only I don't know - perhaps there are some responses to it by now on t'interweb.

I'm not anti-science, I can't understand why people aren't a lot more excited and interested in what they are doing at Cern.

cactus flower wrote:

..
I'm not anti-science, I can't understand why people aren't a lot more excited and interested in what they are doing at Cern.

Maybe because bosons can't reduce traffic gridlock, pay a mortgage or mind a child. ?

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

..
I'm not anti-science, I can't understand why people aren't a lot more excited and interested in what they are doing at Cern.

Maybe because bosons can't reduce traffic gridlock, pay a mortgage or mind a child. ?

Can we be sure of that?

Get your rosary beads out! This thing goes live in September

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Get your rosary beads out! This thing goes live in September

This is a much better site for learners than most I've seen:

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/the-big-questions.html

Some of the questions to which the Cern project may give some answers:

Quote :

How did our universe come to be the way it is?

The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!

What kind of Universe do we live in?

Many physicists think the Universe has more dimensions than the four (space and time) we are aware of. Will the LHC bring us evidence of new dimensions?

Gravity does not fit comfortably into the current descriptions of forces used by physicists. It is also very much weaker than the other forces. One explanation for this may be that our Universe is part of a larger multi dimensional reality and that gravity can leak into other dimensions, making it appear weaker. The LHC may allow us to see evidence of these extra dimensions - for example, the production of mini-black holes which blink into and out of existence in a tiny fraction of a second.

What happened in the Big Bang?

What was the Universe made of before the matter we see around us formed? The LHC will recreate, on a microscale, conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.

At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles - quarks, leptons and the force carriers. As the Universe cooled to 1000 billion degrees, the quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong force) combined into composite particles like protons and neutrons. The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’. This will take us back to the time before these particles formed, re-creating the conditions early in the evolution of the universe, when quarks and gluons were free to mix without combining. The debris detected will provide important information about this very early state of matter.

Where is the antimatter?
The Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we only see matter now. What happened to the antimatter?

Every fundamental matter particle has an antimatter partner with equal but opposite properties such as electric charge (for example, the negative electron has a positive antimatter partner called the positron). Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, but antimatter then disappeared. So what happened to it? Experiments have already shown that some matter particles decay at different rates from their anti-particles, which could explain this. One of the LHC experiments will study these subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles.

Why do particles have mass?

Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What makes this difference? If the LHC reveal particles predicted by theory it will help us understand this.

Particles of light (known as photons) have no mass. Matter particles (such as electrons and quarks) do – and we’re not sure why. British physicist, Peter Higgs, proposed the existence of a field (the Higg’s Field), which pervades the entire Universe and interacts with some particles and this gives them mass. If the theory is right then the field should reveal itself as a particle (the Higg’s particle). The Higg’s particle is too heavy to be made in existing accelerators, but the high energies of the LHC should enable us to produce and detect it.

What is our Universe made of?

Ninety-six percent of our Universe is missing! Much of the missing matter is stuff researchers have called ‘dark matter’. Can the LHC find out what it is made of?

The theory of ‘supersymmetry’ suggests that all known particles have, as yet undetected, ‘superpartners’. If they exist, the LHC should find them. These ‘supersymmetric’ particles may help explain one mystery of the Universe – missing matter. Astronomers detect the gravitational effects of large amounts of matter that can’t be seen and so is called ‘Dark Matter’. One possible explanation of dark matter is that it consists of supersymmetric particles.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

Oh. I that that was the Lisbon Hadron Collider.

*HUGZ*

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

ibis wrote:

Turned out it was all scaremongering...

France and Germany, under enhanced co-operation decided to enter the Event Horizon to create an alternate reality in which the Irish actually voted Yes.

*MORE HUGZ*

For the record I am VERY excited about the whole thing, but don't fully understand exactly what is going on.

I'm also very excited over Virgin Galactic. A little bit of me was lost when Concorde stopped flying but soon we can fly into space, how cool is that! I should do the Lotto, I would buy a ticket straight away.

cookiemonster wrote:

For the record I am VERY excited about the whole thing, but don't fully understand exactly what is going on.

Who does? The atom-bashers themselves might be surprised at what stuff will come out...

Have ye heard about the "Four Forces" and "Theories of Everything" and all that?

First particles injected in Large Hadron Collider according to Telegraph

Quote :

The first particles have been injected into the biggest atom smasher on the planet, marking the start of the countdown to probing the secrets of the universe.
# Peter Higgs: Smashing atoms at CERN and the hunt for the 'God' particle
# The Big Bang: atom-smashing could uncover truth
# Time travellers from the future 'could be here in weeks'

Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole.

Starting up the biggest scientific experiment ever built is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Earlier this month, the successful injection of the first particles - protons - into part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, took place.

This weekend, scientists are hoping to complete testing of another part of the machine, which sits in a 17 mile circular tunnel approximately 100 metres underneath the Franco-Swiss border, with the aim of seeing particles travel the whole way around for the first time.

As such preparations for the formal September 10th start date continue, the entire machine has been successfully cooled to temperatures below minus 270ºC, a fraction of a degree above the lowest achievable temperature.

In this temperature range, helium becomes a liquid, and is used to cool the superconducting magnets which keep the proton beams circulating at almost the speed of light as well as making the LHC the biggest refrigerator on the planet.

The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010.

The protons injected into the giant machine are obtained by removing electrons from hydrogen gas and are then accelerated in bunches.

For the tests, the proton bunches were first accelerated by the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a smaller 4.3 mile ring, before injection (like a lane merging onto a motorway) into the LHC, which has to be timed to the nanosecond to work.

Once the individual detectors around the LHC are ready (the "eyes" that study the effects of collisions between particles), further injection tests will attempt to ensure two counter-rotating proton beams circulate throughout the machine.

Capturing the remnants of high energy collisions between these beams will then become possible, setting the stage for the LHC to potentially rewrite the laws of physics as we know them.

Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for the end of 2008 - this is equivalent to each particle having the energy of a flying mosquito squeezed into a space a million million times smaller.

Withstanding any major setbacks, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC's acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier.

'We're finishing a marathon with a sprint,' said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. 'It's been a long haul, and we're all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.'

One aim of the machine is to improve current theory about the forces that bind together the particles in every atom. Known as the Standard Model, this is one of the triumphs of 20th-century science and fits in with the results of all experiments ever done on sub-atomic particles.

Key to that will be to find a crucial ingredient, the Higgs particle, whose existence goes some way to explain why atoms contain particles that have weight.

Others hope that a menagerie of new particles will be seen when the LHC is switched on - and perhaps some of them will help account for the "dark matter" that astronomers cannot see, although they can detect its existence via the gravitational forces it exerts on other particles.

Full article reprinted without permission from the Telegraph but who cares? The world could be going down the Swanny on September the 10th anyway.