Large Hadron Collider

[tangerine]

october: cop mad jackets and buutz

YESSSSSSSSS

[ROYALEFATALE]

I doubt that would happen, theres probably not enough mass concentrated enough to make a black hole

"At full power, the proton beams at the LHC will run into each other with the force of two 400-ton bullet trains going 100 mph. That amounts to 14 trillion electron volts"

[Charlie Delta]

strangelets/black holes

Strangelets is one of the best words ever!

[ROYALEFATALE]

Strangelets is one of the best words ever!

yes much better than strange matter

[jeepster]

GUYZ ITS OK GORDON FREEMAN IS ON THE JORB

http://www.realitywired.com/gordon-freeman-is-working-on-the-doomsday-machine.html

[Corbin Law]

thank god, i was wondering what to do wtih the headcrab in my closet.

[Le Buttsecks]

thank god, i was wondering what to do wtih the headcrab in my closet.

penis head crab?

[Corbin Law]

gordon freeman vs. dickcrab faiighht

[iGIT]

I know this is a super noob question but i tried googling this and read what it actually was on wikipedia ( yeah i know wikipedia) and I still don't fully grasp what this thing is suppose to do. Someone care to explain?

[billy.]

reenact the big bang.

then kill us all.

[iGIT]

simple. tyty. but ehh how would it do that? There was also talk about black hole?

[billy.]

hawkings talks a little about the black holes here.

probably not happening.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2710348/Stephen-Hawking-Large-Hadron-Collider-vital-for-humanity.html

[Guest]

and what an end of the world party thrown by stephen hawking would be like we will never know

[onemancult]

and what an end of the world party thrown by stephen hawking would be like we will never know

[brohymn]

I know this is a super noob question but i tried googling this and read what it actually was on wikipedia ( yeah i know wikipedia) and I still don't fully grasp what this thing is suppose to do. Someone care to explain?

j50ZssEojtM

But really,

What is the LHC?

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator situated at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). It is not an experiment, more of a laboratory- many different experiments will be performed with it. The LHC is a pair of enormous rings called beampipes, 27km in circumference, into which we inject protons, and speed them up to ridiculously high speeds- almost the speed of light.

Protons are nothing special, they make up a significant portion of the contents of our bodies, and all the material we see around us. Contained within the nucleus of atoms alongside neutrons, they are about 1000 times heavier than the electron. The protons we inject into the LHC are like the blast from a shotgun, rather than a stream of single protons, we inject 'bunches', containing 100,000,000,000 protons in a beam the thickness of a human hair. There are 2808 of these bunches in the machine at any instant, and they will travel around the rings in opposite directions completing a lap of the machine 11000 times per second.

The LHC itself isn't much to look at. It consists of a lot (1232) of shiny blue tubes about the diameter of a car tyre attached end to end around the ring, situated 100m or so beneath the borders of France and Switzerland. These are the superconducting dipoles, which is a fancy name for what is essentially a big magnet. Inside these blue tubes are the beampipes, sitting side by side and surrounded by liquid helium and superconductor. The superconductor needs to be kept cold to operate, and holds an enormous electric current creating a strong magnetic field. This field is what holds our protons inside the accelerator. As the protons travel around the ring they get flung outwards like a kid on a playground roundabout. The magnets provide the nudge needed to stop the protons flying out from the ring in a straight line and burning a hole in the side of the beampipe.

At four different locations on the LHC are 'interaction points' where we bend these two beams together much like the crossovers you see on toy car racetracks. At these interaction points the two beams collide smashing individual protons together unleashing vast amounts of energy in a very small space. This is where we hope to witness some things humankind has never before seen....

The Experiments of the LHC

There are four main experiments, one at each interaction point. These are the real beasts which everyone has probably seen photos of by now. What the hell though, I'll throw in some more.

ATLAS

ATLAS is A Large Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, and is truly a monster of a machine. The biggest of the big experiments, she is as heavy as 100 jumbo jets, and fills a cavern capable of housing Notre Dame cathedral.

CMS

CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid... compact? I think not. It is the heaviest of the experiments at over 12500 tonnes. This is mostly because it has to generate a large magnetic field deep within the detector- the superconducting magnets use an iron return yoke made from the hulls of old russian battleships (no joke!).

LHCb

LHCb is the boringly named Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment. This is the one I work on, and the ugliest of the bunch. I don't know who the hell chose the vomit yellow and green coloring, but the detector itself is beautiful to work with. She's the smallest of the experiments, both in terms of material and researchers, but she's also the most precise, capable of measuring with far higher accuracy than the others.

ALICE

ALICE is A Large Ion Collider Experiment. Rather than looking at protons, ALICE is going balls-to-the-wall and looking at lead ion collisions. This is the equivalent of slamming two elephants together at a few hundred miles an hour and trying to understand the mess, in comparison to the protons used in the other experiments.

So what are the experiments looking for?

The four experiments are each looking at very different things: ATLAS and CMS are 'general purpose' detectors, and are concentrating on looking for the Higgs boson (more on this later), but also looking for signs of new physics and lower resolution studies of the things LHCb and ALICE are looking at. The LHC was primarily designed to find the Higgs, so the two detectors add some redundancy- if one doesn't find it, the other can still do so.

LHCb is trying to tell us why we're made of matter. Sounds like a stupid question, right? Actually it is a bit of a head-scratcher. The Big Bang is now favored as the model of the creation of the universe. It predicts very well a number of phenomena we can measure accurately enough to tell us it's right. It gets it wrong somewhere important though, and that is that our models tell us matter and antimatter were made in equal amounts at the dawn of the universe. We can measure how much antimatter exists now, and it is several billion times less than the amount of matter in the universe. The thing is, this shouldn't make sense- if the same amounts of matter and antimatter were made, and they mixed with each other, they'd annihilate again leaving nothing behind. The fact that there was less antimatter than matter is the reason we exist today, but we don't know why. The LHCb will give us a deeper insight into this.

ALICE is trying to simulate conditions immediately after the big bang, slamming heavy lead ions into each other and releasing so much energy in such a confined space that the temperatures soar to those many thousand times hotter than our sun. Immediately after the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was crammed into a spot a lot smaller than a pinhead, and the conditions there are like something that we cannot find in our universe today. Strange states of matter are thought to have existed at these temperatures, and ALICE will probe them for a better understanding of the formation of the universe we see today.

So will the LHC Kill us all? Is it dangerous?

No.

The LHC is going to produce things physicists have never before seen, but in a lot of cases we hope it will produce things we've predicted. Recently a number of somewhat unsavoury attention whores have misled the media and general public with a campaign based on the possibility that we may produce something truly dangerous. There have been numerous arguments against these 'doomsday scenarios', all from physicists a good deal smarter than me. Here is my take on the subject though:

It was originally considered that the LHC may produce micro black holes. These would be black holes smaller than atoms. Of course, knowing that a black hole is not something you want to get too close to, this drew a lot of scaremongering. The truth is that black holes must be produced at a certain size before they are capable of growing on their own by attracting more matter. That size was estimated in a recent paper to be larger than the mass of our sun. Anything smaller and they just sit there evaporating until they are no more. The smaller the hole, the faster the evaporation. We expected anything the LHC could have produced to live for a few femtoseconds before disappearing. As it turns out, another recent paper provides convincing proof that black holes are not likely to be produced at the LHC at all....

There are other supposed dangers, namely magnetic monopoles and strangelets. In both cases the theory on which these exotic forms of matter have been based is a little crackpotish, and numerous conterarguments have been put forward. To paraphrase Prof. Frank Close of Oxford University's High Energy Physics dept, "The LHC isn't going to end the world. If it does, you can sue me."

*I DID NOT WRITE THIS UP, SOMEONE WHO WORKS AT CERN DID. I hope he doesn't mind that I used it here

[billy.]

hm.

kicked my post's ass.

[thelion1856]

the world will end soon. thank you to all scientists. dont forget 2 feed ur cat.

[Akira]

I R LIVING!!!! yay

[jeepster]

most likely doctored, but this is getting on an epic lulz level.

[po_boy_fuuma_hatesbargerz]

^^^^^^^^^ what the

ahahahahahaha

[cjbreed]

Strangelets is one of the best words ever!

sounds like a band name.

or a radiohead song title

[Augustus]

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

[aitsuka]

that large post up there was just a motherload of knowledge bomb on my head.

I regret not taking physics in hs, damn indian teacher

[Pandemonium]

^ i don't know man i think it was decent average level shit.

dude explained everything in layman's terms so even idiots could understand.

[ledger]

those webcams lol.^

[Eccles]

One of my fave weekly podcasts 'Science With Dr.Karl' explains the LHC

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/drkarl/rss.xml

pretty basic and accessible

answered most of my questions anyway

[PaperSt.]

most likely doctored, but this is getting on an epic lulz level.

[jeepster]

plz refer to page 2 when I posted this as well as an article on it. ktnx. latepass not needed cuz its funny.

[jayrock]

catchy tune

[PaperSt.]

plz refer to page 2 when I posted this as well as an article on it. ktnx. latepass not needed cuz its funny.

Sorry must of missed it, I wondered why you posted the other one at not the Gordon pic