LHC fully activated wednesday

[bascule]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080908140102.htm

 

..and sadly all the news stories I'm seeing are "oh noes, it's going to destroy tha earf!"

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

We have to wait until October 21st to see if we're really all doomed, unfortunately. High-energy collisions don't start until then.

 

And I want this to happen: http://xkcd.com/401/

[Mr Skeptic]

I for one would rather they find a black hole than anything else. One with Hawking radiation. Bye bye energy problems.

[iNow]

A couple of morons have threatened to kill physicists over this:

 

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/07/brian-cox-calls-em-like-he-sees-em/

Thing is, as I’ve noted before, a handful of people with little or no understanding of the science involved claim the LHC might create a black hole or a quantum strangelet which will consume the Earth.

 

These people are wrong.

 

They are, however, scaring lots of other people because the press is eager to make controversy where none exists. A couple of crackpots make a ridiculous claim, it involves esoteric physics, a newspaper or online site laps it up… and thousands of people becomes terrified from something that physically cannot happen.

 

<...>

 

This is coming to a head now that LHC is about to rev up. In

that article

, it says that some

scientists are getting death threats

. Death threats! To people who are trying to understand the Universe! These scientists are like you, and they’re like me: they want understand things, to better our knowledge, to increase the human awareness of the entire nature of reality.

 

And some people want to kill them.

 

 

H/T - Evolving Thoughts

 

 

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider

 

 

How goddamned dumb have humans become?

[Pangloss]

We're all doomed!

 

Is there any truth to the rumor that the LHC is powered by one of these?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Point_Module

[bombus]

Hey guys.

 

Just in case it does all go horribly wrong, it's been a pleasure debating, discussing and laughing with you all, and maybe see you on the other side.

 

If not, it's business as usual on thursday!

 

Bombus

[bascule]

There's now not one, but two web sites where you can check if the LHC has destroyed the earth yet:

 

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

 

and

 

http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

 

Both have RSS feeds, so you can get daily updates delivered to Google Reader or what not automatically!

[iNow]

We're all doomed!

 

Is there any truth to the rumor that the LHC is powered by one of these?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Point_Module

I'm pretty sure the answer to that is a big no, but it's an interesting question. What IS the source of power for the LHC?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Hundreds of migrant squirrels on treadmills.

 

 

Actually: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep08/6690

[Pangloss]

And which alien species is secretly running it??

[iNow]

They're just going off the grid, with diesel generators as back-up. That just seems so pedestrian... way too common for this thing. Good link. Thanks, Cap'n.

[Pangloss]

1.21 gigawatts????

[Sayonara]

And which alien species is secretly running it??

I asked a friend who works with Amicus, the organisation which manages non-humans living and working on Earth, and the reply was along the lines of "that's not important; what's important is that the humans keep smashing those atoms."

 

Needless to say, the shuttle is prepped.

[Pangloss]

Rofl!

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

1.21 gigawatts????

 

That's "jiggawatts".

[Pangloss]

Apologies for the size, but I just couldn't resist the political angle in the last frame.

http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly080709.htm

[iNow]

You'll be able to watch it here:

 

http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

[bascule]

There's a live webcast of the activation available here:

 

http://tf1.lci.fr/infos/endirect/0,,4078645,00-le-lancement-de-l-accelerateur-de-particules-.html

[DrP]

Yesterday a friend of mine told me about a dream he had which he feels may be prophetic on this matter - He was in Dover (SE England) and as he looked across the channel , he saw the whole coastline of France ablaze in violent firestorms. Maybe the experiment will turn out OK after all then! Personally I think it was his subconsious doing some wishful thinking.

[YT2095]

Or so they say...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/08/hadroncollider108.xml

 

And the Earth was not swallowed into a mini black hole!

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

 

pasted into here (it didn`t need another thread).

[Arch2008]

The Equations Remember

 

"We live in a cold and empty universe, in a time when energies are so low that we can no longer see what space contained in the fiery instants when the universe was born. But every kind of particle that ever existed is still there, in the equations that describe the particles and forces of the universe. And we can use accelerators to make the equations come alive: not just as metaphor but as reality.

 

The universe today contains only the stable relics and leftovers of the big bang. The unstable particles have decayed away with time, and the perfect symmetries have been broken as the universe has cooled. But the structure of space remembers all the particles and forces we can no longer see around us. Particle accelerators pump energy into empty space to create the particles and uncover the symmetries that existed in the earliest universe. As accelerators go to higher energies, we probe ever closer to the beginning.

 

Ultimately we must combine what we learn from accelerators with what we learn by detecting the surviving relics of the big bang, using telescopes on the ground and in the sky. It is by synthesizing what we learn from each of these approaches that we will make the two ends meet and develop a comprehensive picture of the universe and how it evolved."

Edited September 10, 2008 by Arch2008

[bascule]

Not a Political Discussion at all...

 

Yeah not sure why this thread got moved to Politics... I started it in General Discussion

[YT2095]

very odd indeed, anyway... I`v moved it back to GD.

[CharonY]

I think they wanted to reach 5-7 TeV until end of this year. I am really interested when it happens. On second though I think I would be more excited once they have evaluated the data.

On third thought I'd probably only be excited if they translate their findings into something that even I would understand...

[Bettina]

Hmmm.... funny, but when I look into my mirror now, I see 11 of me.

 

Bee