Hold on to your butt.... Cern fires up the God machine tomorrow

[jsxtreme]

:eek5::badass:

<Hides under desk

There is a chance there could be a black hole made today. Hopefully it eats the state of Cali whole and then turns itself off.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/06/1?gusrc=rss&feed=science

Beneath the rural tranquillity of the Geneva countryside, where ramshackle sheds dot the wide-open fields, scientists are getting ready for a trip into the unknown. Here, under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, lies the biggest, most complex machine humans have ever built, and on Wednesday they will finally get to turn it on.

For Cern, the European nuclear research organisation, it will mark the end of a lengthy wait and the beginning of a new era of physics. Over the next 20 years or so, the $9bn (£5bn) machine will direct its formidable power towards some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe.

The machine will search for extra dimensions, which could be curled up into microscopic loops. It might produce "dark matter", the unknown substance that stretches through space like an invisible skeleton. And it will almost certainly discover the elusive Higgs boson, which helps explain the origin of mass, and is better known by its wince-inducing monicker, the God particle.

At least that is the hope. For the machine to work a dizzying number of electronic circuits, computer-controlled valves, airtight seals and superconducting magnets must all work in concert.

The machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and when working at full tilt it will drive two beams of particles in opposite directions around a 17 mile (27km) ring at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Every second each of the beams will complete 11,245 laps of the machine.

At four points around the ring the beams will be steered into head-on collisions, causing the particles to slam into one another with enough energy to recreate in a microcosm the violent fireball conditions that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang. Giant detectors, one of which is so enormous it sits in a cavern that could accommodate the nave of Westminster Abbey, will then scrutinise the shower of subatomic debris in the hope of finding something no one has ever seen before.

"This is a once in a generation kind of machine, and we really don't know what we will find," said Brian Cox, a physicist at Manchester University who works on Atlas, LHC's largest detector. "It's like going to Mars. You know you're going to find something new, because you're going where no one has been before."

The awesome power of the LHC has prompted a flurry of alarmist fears that the machine might create a black hole that would swiftly consume the planet. In the run-up to the machine switching on the laboratory has received a steady stream of calls from people wanting reassurance, or simply asking the scientists to stop. Two attempts to stop the machine through the courts were dismissed. Scientists say far more energetic collisions happen regularly in nature, when cosmic rays strike stray particles in space.

The project has drawn more down-to-Earth criticisms too. Sir David King, the government's former chief science adviser, believes it diverts top scientists away from tackling the more pressing issues of the time, such as climate change and how to decarbonise the economy. In total Britain has contributed more than £500m towards the LHC project.

Although Cern has already conducted some basic tests with its machine, Wednesday will be the first attempt to get a beam of subatomic particles called protons circulating inside it.

"If the beam goes all the way round on the first go, that would be quite amazing. It's never happened in the history of particle colliders," said Cern's James Gillies. If the test is successful, scientists may try to send the beam around in the opposite direction, though first collisions are not expected until next month.

They expect to spend a few months getting to grips with the machine before putting it to work in earnest. "People might think we already know a lot about the way things work, but the wheels are coming off our understanding of the universe. We can confidently say that 95% of the universe is made up of stuff we don't understand," said Cox.

Only 5% of the universe is made of matter scientists understand. A further 25% is so-called "dark matter", which clusters around galaxies, and the remaining 70% is even more enigmatic "dark energy", which drives the expansion of the universe.

One of the first discoveries that could emerge is proof of a theory known as supersymmetry. According to the theory, every particle in the universe has a slightly overweight but invisible twin. One of these, called the neutralino, is a leading candidate for dark matter, and could be made as soon as the machine performs its first collisions.

For the 10,000 scientists and engineers involved in the project this is the culmination of more than 20 years of work, the last eight of which were dedicated to bolting the machine together. The machine is designed to reach energies seven times higher than the existing most powerful particle collider in the world, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago.

 

[jsxtreme]

opcorn: I wonder if it has an ice crusher.

 

[Fryguy302]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM"]YouTube - Large Hadron Rap[/ame]

 

[jsxtreme]

LMFAO Raj. :roll:

 

[AutoEuphoria]

Oh good. So, the same scientists that say we can't drive cars around because we might hurt the polar bear or some shit built a machine that can destroy the Earth in an instant if it goes wrong. Awesome :ugh2:

 

[Quick86]

Oh good. So, the same scientists that say we can't drive cars around because we might hurt the polar bear or some shit built a machine that can destroy the Earth in an instant if it goes wrong. Awesome :ugh2:

They aren't doing it on a major scale tho - they're smashing two particles together.. Theres one of these underneath MSU, the Cyclotron... "The cyclotron is the highest-energy continuous beam accelerator in the world."

This has been going on in your backyard for YEARS (since the 1960s) and you never even knew

I'm not concerned.



In fact... The NSCL @ MSU produces 10% of nuclear science ph.d's and is #2 in nuclear physics only to MIT....

 

[jsxtreme]

Its not just two particles Kevin. It's entire BEAMS of particles.

All they are doing today is seeing if they can get the beam of particles to run in a continuous loop. If they do, THEN they will try to collide the beams. Then createing a black whole swallowing the earth and everything in it. :lol:

 

[YLWFVR]

Cool... I'm always down for some nuclear destruction and human demise! Just in time for the election too! LOL

 

[Quick86]

Its not just two particles Kevin. It's entire BEAMS of particles.

All they are doing today is seeing if they can get the beam of particles to run in a continuous loop. If they do, THEN they will try to collide the beams. Then createing a black whole swallowing the earth and everything in it. :lol:

Yes - they are smashing two particle beams together.. The SAME exact thing the cyclotron does @ MSU Read up on what I posted about.

 

[jsxtreme]

Remember me?

 

[jsxtreme]

Yes - they are smashing two particle beams together.. The SAME exact thing the cyclotron does @ MSU Read up on what I posted about.

So there is a 17 mile long ring built under MSU that cost 9bn pounds? Well I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbert.

Link? :lol:

They do something similar, but not on this scale. They just have a cyclotron.

Limitations of the cyclotron

The magnet portion of a large cyclotron. The gray object is the upper pole piece, routing the magnetic field in two loops through a similar part below. The white canisters held conductive coils to generate the magnetic field. The D electrodes are contained in a vacuum chamber that was inserted in the central field gap.The spiral path of the cyclotron beam can only "synch up" with klystron-type (constant frequency) voltage sources if the accelerated particles are approximately obeying Newton's Laws of Motion. If the particles become fast enough that relativistic effects become important, the beam gets out of phase with the oscillating electric field, and cannot receive any additional acceleration. The cyclotron is therefore only capable of accelerating particles up to a few percent of the speed of light. To accommodate increased mass the magnetic field may be modified by appropriately shaping the pole pieces as in the isochronous cyclotrons, operating in a pulsed mode and changing the frequency applied to the dees as in the synchrocyclotrons, either of which is limited by the diminishing cost effectiveness of making larger machines. Cost limitations have been overcome by employing the more complex synchrotron or linear accelerator, both of which have the advantage of scalability, offering more power within an improved cost structure as the machines are made larger.

 

[Quick86]

Yes, I did quote Wikipedia.. Good job on doing a search.. I've lived here my entire life and know a bit about it


Go do your reading. These tests have been going on for a LONG time, but no press has been given to the one here in East Lansing because it's university run.....

 

[4 cam tbird]

They're trying to get particles to run in circles? What is this, subatomic NASCAR?

 

[Sean]

I for one am pretty exicted about the whole thing. I am fiarly eger to see if any of the current dogmatic theorys of quantum and particle physics hold any water at all.

As for the black hole. Well it had to end sometime.

 

[Quick86]

They're doing this on such a small scale that even if a black hole FORMED it won't be strong enough to do anything but pass through the earth - and thats IF it's stable.. It's some STUPID odd that a black hole would even form!

 

[91Notch]

:scared:

 

[lethalss]

I'm excited for this, I can't wait to see if they can prove dark energy, and anti-matter, some very cool shit.

 

[jdustu]

We need to start a motown muscle quantum physics club:icon_mrgr I love reading Susskind, Hawkins, Sagan, ect. But I don't retain much of it because I really don't have anyone to discuss it with. "A quark, what? get away from me you freak!!"

 

[soap]

While it is an interesting project..........the actual theory behind what is going on is WAY over my head.

--Joe

 

[jdustu]

I can't wait for the movie

Brian Cox, a glamorous particle physicist who literally was once a rock star, told London's Daily Telegraph that he and his colleagues had been receiving death threats. He then bluntly characterized anyone who feared the LHC would destroy the world with an unprintable term for a female body part.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,419404,00.html