Any other physics geeks out there?

[in_a_days]

I'm not even joking... I might be more excited about this than the start of the football season...

LHC Wikipedia Info (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider)

LHC Official CERN Page (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cern.ch%2FLHC%2F&ei=lvpqSIW5H5SQhALN19GeDA&usg=AFQjCNGdSLJnx3Li0wyaaS8TuOdGNK7M-A&sig2=9kNZ3Xh8MXhojuipg6nWCg)

Countdown to Activation (http://www.lhcountdown.com/)

[BFISA]

Now WTF did the Atom do to y'all to make y'all wanna keep splittin it :icon_eek: :tdown: :icon_evil:

[in_a_days]

Now WTF did the Atom do to y'all to make y'all wanna keep splittin it :icon_eek: :tdown: :icon_evil:

:lol:

An atom once called a physicist a geek and they've all been trying to smash it into something smaller since. :yes:

[VAN DA KNIGHTMAN]

im not really a geek, but im educated.

i took physics last year in school, as a junior(im srry that is one of my proudest moments passing that damn class i gotta brag).

so what exactly will this whole thing do to help people?

[in_a_days]

im not really a geek, but im educated.

i took physics last year in school, as a junior(im srry that is one of my proudest moments passing that damn class i gotta brag).

so what exactly will this whole thing do to help people?

Well it's tough to anticipate how the discoveries this thing will assist us with might help people, because we really can really only speculate what it's going to show us.

But in the big pictures it's going to make major strides as far as telling us what modern theories are accurate and which are not. The energy levels and particle interactions that are going to take place inside this machine have literally not existed (at least in a time or place in which we can witness and measure it) in the universe since the first moments after the big bang.

There are a lot of different competing theories out there that attempt to describe huge chunks of the way the universe works from Einstein's Standard Model, to Quantum Physics, to String Theory and beyond. All these different models offer slightly different predictions for what we can expect from the experiments this machine will perform. Hopefully the actual results will confirm one of these theories as being the most accurate and in tune with the way the universe actually functions. And that will be a major step forward for physics because it will basically tell us which path we need to follow from here to continue advancing the science.

I know it's all pretty abstract, but I think I share a sentiment with the people that have created all this stuff; that the more we know about the universe and how it functions, how it started and where's it's going, the more we might actually learn about ourselves and our role therein.

[Thumper]

Funny, I just got into a conversation about this with my aunt recently. She believes that is going to create a micro black hole and suck the earth into it. Umm... I disagreed.

[in_a_days]

Funny, I just got into a conversation about this with my aunt recently. She believes that is going to create a micro black hole and suck the earth into it. Umm... I disagreed.

I can't find the link, but I recently read on a physics blog some guy requesting some other guy to stop spamming internet boards and university e-mail boxes with demands to hault the project. Like the guy was calling the physics department at MIT like 15 times a day and harassing professors, leaving threatening messages and shit.

The request to the spammer was very humorous and condescending, and I must admit... I laughed my balls off. I'll post the link if I ever find it.

I think CERN researches estimate the odds of a catastrophe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 40 million.

[Shamrock]

This is like asking which came first .... the chicken or the egg?

Then they'll find out it was neither.

[in_a_days]

This is like asking which came first .... the chicken or the egg?

Then they'll find out it was neither.

Learning that everyone is wrong would be just as valuable as learning that one person is right. :yes:

[Charger Dave]

Now WTF did the Atom do to y'all to make y'all wanna keep splittin it :icon_eek: :tdown: :icon_evil:Buncha frickin bullys if you ask me.
:lol:

[in_a_days]

The solar system isn't round (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/07/02/solarsystem.ap/index.html)


Who knew? Solar system is 'dented,' not round

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When viewed from the rest of the galaxy, the edge of our solar system appears slightly dented as if a giant hand is pushing one edge of it inward, far-traveling NASA probes reveal.

Information from Earth's first space probes to hit the thick edge of the solar system -- called the heliosheath where the solar wind slows abruptly -- paint a picture that is not the simple circle that astronomers long thought, according to several studies published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Surprised astronomers said they will have to change their models for what the solar system looks like.

In 1977, NASA launched two space probes on missions beyond the solar system. Voyager 1 went north and Voyager 2 went south. What startled astronomers is that when the two of them hit the heliosheath they did so at different distances from the sun.

[VAN DA KNIGHTMAN]

This is like asking which came first .... the chicken or the egg?

Then they'll find out it was neither.

Egg, because genetic mutations can only occur in the embryonic stage of life.


Assuming that the being coming before a chicken is some sort of dino-chicken, the genetic differences can only result from mutations while the chicken is in the egg.

[in_a_days]

LHC Ignition Delayed Until August, Earth Spared Another Month (http://gizmodo.com/5022849/lhc-ignition-delayed-until-august-earth-spared-another-month)

The scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have decided to delay the ignition of the massive particle accelerator. The LHC countdown now shows 30 more days, so you can enjoy July to its full potential. In case you don't know what a Large Hadron Collider is, it's the thingamajig that is supposed to find the Force that binds all things or—according to some morons—was supposed to kill us all yesterday. Wait, hold on a moment here. Maybe they activated it. Maybe the first collision created a white hole that sucked the whole Universe in, and we got back in time.

[in_a_days]

LHC: Cern in numbers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/cern.particlephysics2)

Extraordinary facts and figures relating to the LHC

* The Guardian,
* Monday June 30, 2008
* Article history

Visitors stand in front of the ATLAS detector during the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) Open Day at the European Particle Physics laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland

Visitors stand in front of the ATLAS detector. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/AP

· The Large Hadron Collider at Cern has been installed in a tunnel 27km in circumference, buried 100m underground.

· It will produce head-on collisions between two beams of particles travelling through a vacuum comparable to outer space.

· Each beam will consist of almost 3000 bunches of 100 billion particles each.

· At full power, each beam will be about as energetic as a car moving at 1600 kph.

· At near light speed, a proton in the LHC beam will make 11,245 laps a second.

· A beam might circulate for 10 hours, travelling more than 10 billion kilometres - far enough to get to the planet Neptune and back.

· 3000km of wires and fibres will carry information at the rate of 3200 terabytes per year, equivalent to around 3 billion books.

[in_a_days]

Looking for neutralinos at the Large Hadron Collide (http://www.physorg.com/news134822510.html)
By Miranda Marquit, Physics / Physics

“We are looking at the heavens, and using the very biggest things to help up predict what will happen with the very smallest things,” David Toback tells PhysOrg.com. Toback is a professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, and he believes that there is a way to combine cosmology and particle physics in a way that can help us learn more about the universe.

“We’re interested in the dark matter question,” Toback continues. “Our current best guess is that the particles we know and love only make up about four percent of the stuff in the universe. Twenty-three percent of the universe is dark matter. The rest is dark energy. But I’m interested in dark matter, which should be made of particles. We want to know the properties of the bulk of the matter in the universe. This is a question that interests both cosmologists and particle physicists.”

Toback and his colleagues at Texas A&M, Richard Arnowitt, Bhaskar Dutta, Alfredo Gurrola, Teruki Kamon and Abram Krislock, have been working on a model that allows them to use information obtained from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to predict the amount of dark matter left over from the beginning of the universe. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters: “Determining the Dark Matter Relic Density in the Minimal Supergravity Stau-Neutralino Coannihilation Region at the Large Hadron Collider.”

[Daddy_O]

The funny thing is, the experiment, like any other, has variables yet to be discovered, such as the jump I made on my bicycle when I was 8.

Looked cool until the landing. Wonder if the scientists consider the consequences of this test yet? 1 in 40 million? I think that was my calculation too. :icon_rofl:

[in_a_days]

Cern lab goes 'colder than space' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7512586.stm)


By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.

The Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The LHC has thousands of magnets which will be maintained in this frigid condition using liquid helium.

The magnets are arranged in a ring that runs for 27km through the giant tunnel.

[Kwak]

LHC Ignition Delayed Until August, Earth Spared Another Month (http://gizmodo.com/5022849/lhc-ignition-delayed-until-august-earth-spared-another-month)

Well, then I get to enjoy my 10th Anniversary in Belize before the world ends. :thumbup1:

[in_a_days]

Deep thinking (http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=bc551850-3058-4227-9512-0aa20031e97f&p=1)


A science experiment set up inside a tunnel up to 175 metres underground aims to provide answers to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the origins of the universe
MARTIN COLES, Special to the Gazette
Published: Monday, July 28

According to popular belief, Galileo dropped a variety of objects from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a scientific experiment to find out whether heavy objects fall faster than light ones. I mention this to demonstrate that there was a time, 400 years ago, when ordinary mortals could understand what scientists were up to. Since that time, scientific experiments have become progressively more arcane, more weird, more disconnected from everyday life.

This trend toward incomprehensibility is about to culminate in the world's largest, most expensive and most complicated scientific experiment, which is being readied in a deep tunnel that runs in a circle underneath parts of Switzerland and France.

[pure-sol]

I'm actually really excited to see what they/ we all learn from the LHC. The scare about mini black holes is just an ignorant belief, but it is pretty funny!

[in_a_days]

What will the LHC find? (http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/08/04/what-will-the-lhc-find/)


With the Large Hadron Collider almost ready to turn on, it’s time to prepare ourselves for what it might find. (The real experts, of course, have been preparing themselves for this for many years!) Chad Orzel was asked what we should expect from the LHC, and I thought it would be fun to give my own take. So here are my judgments for the likelihoods that we will discover various different things at the LHC — to be more precise, let’s say “the chance that, five years after the first physics data are taken, most particle physicists will agree that the LHC has discovered this particular thing.” (Percentages do not add up to 100%, as they are in no way exclusive; there’s nothing wrong with discovering both supersymmetry and the Higgs boson.) I’m pretty sure that I’ve never proposed a new theory that could be directly tested at the LHC, so I can be completely unbiased, as there’s no way that this experiment is winning any Nobels for me. On the other hand, honest particle phenomenologists might be aware of pro- or con- arguments for various of these scenarios that I’m not familiar with, so feel free to chime in in the comments. (Other predictions are easy enough to come by, but none with our trademark penchant for unrealistically precise quantification.)

[in_a_days]

... and it begins (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/35386)


LHC sees first protons

Physicists at the CERN laboratory near Geneva are starting the week with a spring in their steps, having successfully injected the first protons into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the weekend. The test saw protons travelling 3 km through one of the LHC’s eight sectors, which bodes well for the start-up proper on September 10.

“There are lot of very happy people here today,” says CERN spokesperson James Gillies. “The test couldn’t have gone better.”

[in_a_days]

Make or Break Time for Peter Higgs' Theory (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4547511.ece)


The man with the answer to life, the universe and (nearly) everything

British scientist Peter Higgs dreamt up a theory explaining the tiny particles that make up everything, including you, decades ago. At last he's set to be proved right.

Jonathan Leake

Peter Higgs remembers the day everything suddenly began to make sense. “It was July 16, 1964, when some new research papers arrived. I looked at one, realised what it meant and then jumped up and shouted out loud: ‘Oh shit’.”

For years his colleagues had been working on theories about the building blocks of the universe – and Higgs had disagreed with them all. The trouble was, he’d had no better suggestions.

Now he had an idea and spent the weekend mulling it over. “When I came back to work on Monday, I sat down and wrote a new paper as fast as I could,” he recalled in an interview last week.

[in_a_days]

D'oh! (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/20/hadron.collider.damage.ap/index.html)


Large Hadron Collider down for 2 months

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- The world's largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month, is more badly damaged than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

Experts have gone into the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its September 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

[ChargerPessimist]

D'oh! (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/20/hadron.collider.damage.ap/index.html)

how exactly is it damaged?

mayb for the best?

theories were flyin around that it could swiss cheese the earth.

i also kinda funny they phrased it like that. especially being on the French-SWISS border

[pure-sol]

how exactly is it damaged?

mayb for the best?

theories were flyin around that it could swiss cheese the earth.

i also kinda funny they phrased it like that. especially being on the French-SWISS border

I think when they told the public that "mini-black holes" could happen, it was a misnomer. The only reason why real black holes seem to devour all matter is because their masses are GINORMOUS. The masses we're dealing with in the LHC are just parts of atoms. I mean, we're talking atomic units here, not even grams. With black holes, we're talking like 10 million solar masses. Huge difference! :yes: