Large Hadron Collider and hilarious overreactions
 

It's a bit nerdy, but... :mrgreen:
http://www.lhcountdown.com/?p=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

http://gizmodo.com/392324/spammer-ke...der-assploding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_...adron_Collider

Extremely nerdy.... But recreating the birth of the universe is....... *bursts out laughing* ....pure insanity! :twisted:

That's the most out-there, courageous thing I have read in a while! Good luck to them and i'll be watching what happens!:thumbup:

The science is beyond me but the general plan seems pretty neat!

I keep thinking Black Mesa when I look at the pictures of this place.

"Please activate the mass spectrometer Gordon..."

It's an absolute giant project in the long run of things. 17 miles in diameter and 600 feet under ground.

LHC stories
 

I heard about the project about a year ago on NPR's All Things Considered and checked out the CERN website then and was quite awed.

Listen to Pt.1 page http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=9433495
Listen to Pt.2 page http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=9473392

...and the follow up a year later...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=89265915
Scientists in Geneva are readying the largest particle accelerator ever built. But BPP regular David Morgan says at least two men are suing to stop the accelerator because they fear it will swallow all of planet Earth.

Edit: added LHC podcast link at iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/M...t?id=251294167

The forum here at MW never ceases to amaze me lest I forget great minds think alike.

Now it's on its way to becoming one of the coldest thing in the universe! :mrgreen:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7512586.stm

Oddly enough if this experiment was to be conducted in the US - the entire project would be literally blacklisted by the very same community that is currently embracing it ;)

haha man this is great i'm really excited as how this will work out!

hmm imagine this whole thing quenches... omg biggest explosion on earth ever? :D

1.9 degrees Kelvin...so the accelerator will be operating at just barely over absolute zero.

What the hell are they using to super cool that thing without destroying the materials around it.

the article says liquid helium. i guess it to be in some kind of metal tubing.

barely over 0 kelvin would be around a half billionth K which was achieved by a science group in the US

I just have to point out, since I work for the world leader in mass specs.... a mass specometer isnt a colider.. its a measurement device to measure mass at the atom level.

Monitor the cooldown process online. :mrgreen:
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/Cooldown_status.htm

hmm looks like sector 8 - 1 still has a long way to go :)

nothing compared to a meteorite striking us :-)

probably not ;) but then again it depends on the size of the meteor

It's not an explosion they are worried about but rather an implosion, as in black hole. Or possibly causing another big bang.

But that's the paranoids spouting that crap, the safety report should have never stated those possibilities.

They're not actually doing collision tests tomorrow, but they will be shooting a proton beam inside the collider.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/Press.../PR06.08E.html

Live coverage of the activation
http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

to even think that we can re-create the power required to do anything that happens in massive effects found only in the celestial bodies is naive.

Here's a 5 minute scientific outline of the project.

I have my crowbar ready, no head humpers are gonna get me.

Found this, very informative for the non-particle physicist types.

OMG it's all clear now, I get it! :laugh:

Oh, just in case shit goes down, he's got our back.

http://spiffu.com/stuff/freeman.jpg

LOL, nice!

http://gizmodo.com/assets/images/giz...firstbeam1.jpg
That's hot.

i love it!

gordon freeman is gonna save us if a portal pops up

Lisa Randall from Harvard will be there to keep us safe.

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/6...randallxq3.jpg

She's my favorite Physicist right now. She will be hoping for some extra dimensions to show them selves. Maybe a brane or two.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Found these tonight, they give you a glimpse into the compact muon solenoid experiment.

Lol :lol: - hopefully its not a preview of coming events ;)

Teen commits suicide after 'end of world' reports

liquid nitrogen

oh well, enjoy yuour last moments, grap a mp3 of portishead's glory box, some astro glide or some other slippery substance, close your eyes, think about monica bellucci, best way to go

Man, you've thought this through, haven't you? :mrgreen:

So I guess natural selection does work!

I'm sorry, I just can't feel sorry for people like that. Third world country + kid f'ed in the head (obviously) = an hero.

Uh, oh.

http://spiffu.com/stuff/gman.jpg

Well that's two for two.

We should all be ready for the 7 hour war.

hmm well that is what i thought first but this girl is indian and therefore because of her hindu belief and something i don't get about dying in this world and not being able to reincarnate with the black hole and whatnot she decided to kill herself.

a rather sad story :-(

no chance, you can't go that far down with liquid nitrogen. what i believe is used is actually liquid Helium (well that is what they use in our NMR machines at the institute, and they operate at around the same temperature range)

As the saying goes, religion is the opiate of the masses, in this case it was cyanide.

Hahaha.. all the half-life stuff is just too good to be true.

So apparently an accident did happen during the start up test.

But a resonance cascade did not occur as we all were fearing.

An electrical malfunction caused a leak of sorts, of liquid helium in the acceleration tunnel. So now they have to heat up that section to ambient temperature and fix the problem, then re-cool it back down to near absolute zero. (as in minus 400 degrees or so)

This process is supposed to take 2 months. :(

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science....ap/index.html

Of course this could be a cover story. :P

You have to worry a little when the men in suits don't know how to fit a hardhat.:mrgreen:

Wow...

-Creator of the Wanted comic book, Mark Millar

Well, my respect for him just disappeared ;-). A rant with no substance.

it's -459,67 degrees fahrenheit for y'all yanks ;) or -279.15 degrees centigrade for the rest of the world

and good job finding Gordon, i feel very safe now :laugh:

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Seems they are ahead of schedule, and have brought it back online!

Say what you want, but this guy makes a FANTASTIC point:

This whole experiement is just as stupid as the CDC nut jobs that have reanimated the 1918 Flu virus - just to see how it works. (Just to clarify, the 1918 virus is more deadly than the current birdflu strains, because this one is airborne and human ready.. ;))

These folks are not pursuing these experiments in the "pursuit of science" - theya re simply in the "pursuit of dollars". ;)

Science for greed - has pretty much been the primary motivator for the last 30 years.

They haven't even performed any experiments yet and you're blasting this kind of ignorance, you sound just like the guy you are praising.

Open your mind and read up on some astrophysics and astronomy. These people realize there is more to the universe than themselves and the space two feet in front of them.

You are so hell bent on coming across as an insulting cock you TOTAlLY missed the ACTUAL point of my post.

The "5 billion pounds on a scientific folly when old people can't afford to heat their homes or kids are starving?" is the part I commented on.

The real and actual USABLE gains that the 10 billion dollars spent will be rather minimal at best. They can't even get the equipment to work properly for goodness sakes.

Again ASSuming that just because I question the astonishing price tag and minimal realworld gains I don't have a brod interest or am not well read.

[sarcasm]
Sure they do - and 80 years after the atom was first split and promised the world abundant clean energy all we really have to show for the great scientific discovery is 10,000's of nuclear warheads and about 500 "nukeular" powerplants generating less than 20% of the world electricity.

Oh, and Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.
[/sarcasm]

I'm sorry you got so offended, but...

Regarding nuclear power, it takes a few lemons to make lemon aid. The the fact that there aren't hundreds or thousands more reactor plants around the world is the fault of stubborn politicians and their legislations and ignorant, paranoid hippy morons and think they anything with the word nuclear is evil.

In San Diego a large group of people protested the docking of nuclear submarines in the harbor, not realizing nuclear carriers had been docked their for decades. The Navy basically told them to fuck off.

The cost of the LHC is really small considering the size and scope of it compared to other scientific projects. The lawrence livermore labratories have projects going on ten times in cost. $5 billion is pocket change in the scope of major projects on the world scale these days. *cough*Iraqwar*cough*

I think it's a small price to pay in exchange to possiblly learn innermost properties and workings of our universe. A lot of the things they are looking for a clues to theories in finding a way around the light speed barrier. Not that we've come any where close with convential means, it's just that we want to find that it's theoretically possible.

So far all previous colliders like the one in Fermilab and the Heavy Ion Collider in New York have made tremendous discoveries. The LHC is seven times more powerful than any of those.

Pounds.. not dollars.

And how does this help a suburbanite in Perth or a starving child in Ethiopia or an immigrant in Russia being beaten up because he is a black muslim or an unwed mother in London or a family in Detroit trying to pay their rent or a baby drinking poisonous formula in China?

Which have hepled the ordinary citizens of the world how?

The further advance of knowledge of the human race? Sorry that sounds so trite. If humans didn't have intellectual curiosity we would be no where near where we are today as a society. The unknown is always what we go after.

Sorry, it's not going to feed the poor or build dams. Go join up with Sally Struthers if you want a bigger soap box for those kind of issues.

The fact of the matter is countries and even individuals (Bill Gates) donating much much larger sums to third world countries and it still hasn't made much of a difference.

By the way the processor you're using to your words is most likely using quantum tunneling in it's cpu architecture. An observation of electrons in quantum mechanics at Fermilabs atom smasher.

So yes, practical means have come from these experiments.

I visited the Natulis museum and submarine near Mystic Conn. after a while I realised, it was a very fancy spent nuclear storage facility.

The new collider in Europe is small compaired to the one that was planned for Texas near Dallas that was later cancelled by congress due to its cost. Physicists in the US have been sucking hind tit ever since then.

Day 12 no electricity.