when will they start
colliding aircraft carriers?
LHC particle-punisher in record 7 TeV hypercollisions
It's official: as this is written, the most powerful particle collisions ever achieved by the human race are taking place inside the great subterranean detector caverns of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An initial hiccup this morning saw an overly-jumpy automatic protection system quench a magnet and dump one of the beams, …
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:15 GMT Charlie Clark
Playmobil reconstruction, shurely
""We could not contain the joy," reported a CERN spokeswoman as riotous scenes took place in the control rooms earlier on."
Love the LHC stuff, keep it coming. One thing does worry me - what if the doommongeres like Dr. Dark Energy do turn out to be right? Surely that will mean
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Cool and congrats...
So now I have question - a dumb one; but one I hope somebody in the particle physics arena can answer.
What precisely will knowing if there are larger mass particles or prove symmetry or the existence of Higgs particles mean for us?
I mean - longer life batteries, faster cars, improvements in energy consumption....?
I don't precisely know what this and the large financial investment is all meant to lead to.
... genuine question!
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:54 GMT BoldMan
All those things and potentially more
Understanding the fundamental particle physics means there are greater possibilities for industrial processes in the future. Fusion reactors?
Then again, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is always a worthwhile pursuit IMO - it doesn't HAVE to be able to be turned into a product. Understanding the nature of the universe is important
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 14:21 GMT Annihilator
Who's the third?
Said by Eddington (or so it's believed) about people who understand relativity. The number is much higher today.
Without relativity today, GPS wouldn't work. That's just one example. Most theoretical physics is done without any practical applications in mind. That's challenge two :-)
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:15 GMT Manas Straw
Top Stuff, Sir!
"Tinfoilclad doom prophets around the world - fearing some kind of planet-imploding black hole mishap, planetary soupening or custardisation event etc - no doubt found it a trouser-moistening moment"
All of this goodness, packed into a single sentence.
Give this man a beer, or two!
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:52 GMT Nosher
Why not try for 14TeV now?
Soooo... if it's scheduled to be off-line for a year anyway, and the outcome of a possible failure is similar to the last time it blew up, then why don't they just try a full-power run for a laff? What's the worst that can happen? Oh, it's offline for a year to fix it. Erm...
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Crossing beams? Always a bad idea
Having established their stability, these beams were allowed to cross paths and collide.
This 7 TeV event, which took place on Tuesday at 1200 BST, was the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator.
"This is new territory," said Professor Tonelli.
and then promptly shuts it down for a year for maintenance and any signs of Parallel Micro Universes or Time Wave Distortions.
What a bunch of Tesla Teezers:+~
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:58 GMT Ed Blackshaw
A minor correction...
"lightspeed 3.5 tera-electron-volt (TeV) protons"
Well, they can either be at light speed, or have an energy of 3.5 TeV. I'm sure that any physicist will point out to you that the energy of the particles is due to a combination of mass and velocity and, due to relativity, as they approach the speed of light, their mass, and therefore energy, approaches infinity. Hence only massless particles (such as photons) can travel at the speed of light...
As I said, its a minor correction, but an important one. The protons are actually accelerated to around 99.99% the speed of light.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 12:58 GMT Dodgy Geezer
Here's to pure maths, and may it never be of any use....
@...So now I have question - a dumb one; but one I hope somebody in the particle physics arena can answer.
What precisely will knowing if there are larger mass particles or prove symmetry or the existence of Higgs particles mean for us?
I mean - longer life batteries, faster cars, improvements in energy consumption....?...@
The way it works is that pure research is usually completely without application when it's done. It simply raises the curtain about how things work a little more. Like Democritus around 400BC, when he developed the concept of the atom - there was nothing you could do with it then.
Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and you get a limitless source of energy for mankind....
I don't precisely know what this and the large financial investment is all meant to lead to.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 13:03 GMT The Original Ash
Coincidentally...
... I started watching Fringe last night. Managed about 20 minutes of an episode from an online "cache" and decided it was worth a look. £20 later and I own the first series! Here's hoping there's some references to atom-smashing and other wonderful sciency gubbins to explain the 6th-sense style words in the intro.
(Psst... Hey, big media. Yeah, I saw 20 minutes of your show from an unlicensed source AND THEN BOUGHT THE WHOLE FIRST SEASON. Think about it...)
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 13:10 GMT Dungeekin
The Press Release...
...would indicate there's a long way to go before they finally discover (or not) the God Particle.
"First, our testing will continue with particles, increasing the energy involved until we reach the target of 7 TeV. This is a huge amount of energy, far beyond anything ever achieved by a man-made device before - to give you an idea of just how much it is, 7TeV is almost sufficient energy to restart Dick Cheney's heart.
Finally, once we have established stable test collisions of protons at these energy levels, we will move on to our objective....."
The Press Release is here: http://dungeekin.blogspot.com/2010/03/cern-lhc-update-30032010.html
D
*warning: May contain traces of satire.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 14:06 GMT Timothy
"riotous scenes took place in the control rooms"
I can picture a bunch of rioting scientists:
Hey Earl, I just changed the scale from metric to the English system!
Hey Joe, I used an 8.0000837 mm ball in the chair instead of the 8.0000000000 mm ball!
John! I added the sign: Get the Lead Out to our Pb
I just put a head on my root beer!
All of them in chorus at the end: Beam me up Scotty! There is no intelligent life down here!
Too much excitement for me!
PS: I am happy it succeeded :)
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 14:33 GMT Pete Tong
Nice physics, shame about the funding cuts.
"That's always the challenge for pure science: demonstrating value to the bean counters."
Sadly we are failing at it - else why are we withdrawing from huge amounts of physics and astronomy projects. Myself I work on the LHC for a UK university - but I am now under threat of imminent redundancy to "save money", and many colleagues have already been made redundant.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 18:32 GMT Joel Cholakians
A B C D E OF F - for Fail...
"Tinfoilclad doom prophets around the world - fearing some kind of planet-imploding black hole mishap, planetary soupening or custardisation event etc - no doubt found it a trouser-moistening moment"
Laddies & Gentlemen - I woke up and not a single moist part in my pants. But I did need to take a leak a few times during the night. LOL
A) They keep boosting the power and maybe like NASA encounter a few big bangs of there own.
Sadly i don't know how many body parts will remain.
B) They reach the limit, and nothing like a God particle is revealed or other, and all there experiments achieved will be acceleration (good stuff) sad and boring collisions.
C) They wake up and realise that if God had anything to do with it, he would have put a password on at the sub atomic level.
D) They just over stated the possible findings of such experiments so they could get funding.
E) They run out of funding.
F) God has no TeV limits or other, humans have a 7-14 TeV limit... HAHAHA
I prefer (E)...
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 21:00 GMT Stevie
Fools!
Not only *did* the world end as a result of this ill-conceived nitwit experiment, a carbon copy was immediately created in an alternate dimension from which I am currently viewing what is now called "The Register".
Unfortunately, due to some as-yet unexplained inconsistency in subatomic parity between what was The Earth and this, this, this shadow Earth, I have $100 less in my bank account this morning, and, I might add, a pounding headache and nausea like you wouldn't believe. It also seems I wet the bed as a result of some sort of interdimensional bladder destabilisation event.
So much for "science".
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 21:00 GMT Majid
Humanity are just insignificant little creatures
We are completely insignificant in the greater order of things.
No we can't blow up the world with our nukes. and we definitely can't create black holes with a 27 km kiddies racetrack.
So please stop this non-sense, and let the scientist play with their racetrack multi-billion racetrack the way I played with mine (which I bought it for about 50 gulden, which is now about 25 gulden) when I was a kid.. Damn it was fun bumping those cars against each other at my self made junction.
I should have patent it.. doh.. lost millions there..ah well another opportunity down the drain.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 21:07 GMT Alan Firminger
An extra dimension ( or two )
It's there, I tell you, it's there. They laughed at me.
How else can there be action at a distance.
Astronomy and string theory both need it.
I have a convincing experience of thought transferance. There is plenty of serious 'proof'.
We need access to stop having to pay the bus.
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Tuesday 30th March 2010 21:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Have no fear, tinfoil hat brigade!
You can always sell your unneeded headgear to the anti-healthcare reform crowd in the U.S.!!
But that being said, if a stray mini-black hole has now plummeted through the bottom of the LHC and is slowly assimilating the earth's core, we won't see the horrific results for at least a few years yet!! But I am glad to see that Western Europe has not yet decayed into a pile of chocolate pudding....
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Wednesday 31st March 2010 07:57 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
There have been some remarks about the use of it all
We could equally say: Why should anyone pay millions for a Picasso, Rembrandt or Van Gogh? Why should anyone pay a composer, or musician, or a fiction writer?
Answers: because we are human beings. We just like doing certain things because of curiosity or because we want to move our fellow humans emotionally. Most of all we make music, paintings sculptures and do science because it is fun, or because we could not imagine us being us WITHOUT doing it.
In the very long run, if we are to survive, we will need to travel vast distances in space. Better understanding of physics is essential to this venture. However, in my opinion, we will only be worth saving in the long run if we do not lose our ability to do things out of curiosity, creativity and compassion, and without looking at the bottom line all the time.
No beancounter can ever put a value on the joy of doing science
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Wednesday 31st March 2010 08:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Truly amazing
Michael Barnett, a physicist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that he had worked on an experiment for the Superconducting Supercollider for 10 years until the project was canceled by Congress, and later spent 16 years on the Atlas experiment at the CERN collider.
“We are on this planet and in this universe a short time,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The dreams of a lifetime are waiting, and hopefully not much longer.”
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Wednesday 31st March 2010 10:08 GMT Andus McCoatover
Remarkable!
I've been fascinated by reading about this all morning. Great achievement.
But, also I've read conflicting reports about the power of the beam cluster by "Science Correspondents" of newspapers. Differing between "mosquito on a windscreen" to "cruising warship"
Wikipedia - if citated correctly - has the staggering detail:
<The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique operational issues on account of the huge energy stored in the magnets and the beams.[28][60] While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ (equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).[61]
Loss of only one ten-millionth part (10−7) of the beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must absorb 362 MJ (87 kilograms of TNT) for each of the two beams. These immense energies are even more impressive considering how little matter is carrying it: under nominal operating conditions (2,808 bunches per beam, 1.15×1011 protons per bunch), the beam pipes contain 1.0×10−9 gram of hydrogen, which, in standard conditions for temperature and pressure, would fill the volume of one grain of fine sand.>
Now, that's a helluva grain of sand!
As an aside, I was at the Joint European Taurus (JET) in Oxfordshire some 25 years ago, helping them set up a new digital 'scope. I remember seeing - or not seeing - the plasma beam. (On a display, natch).
Ever (not) seen aerogel? You can't make up your mind whether it's there or not. Something in the brain won't accept it. Check the link* to see what I mean. Same as the plasma beam. It was like someone shining a bright torch across your line of vision through the worst pea-souper fog imaginable.
Love to see that particle bunch. or not see...
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerogelbrick.jpg
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