Accelerated particles: Housed in a 27-kilometre-circumference tunnel under the French-Swiss border, the LHC is expected to be up and running by July or August.
Credit: CERN
GENEVA: The world's biggest atom-smasher, now close to completion at the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) laboratory near Geneva, is a study in big numbers:
- The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will whiz protons to 99.9999 per cent of the speed of light in two parallel beams in a ring-shaped tunnel, 27 kilometres (16.9 miles) long and up to 175 metres (568 feet) below the ground. The tunnel straddles the French-Swiss border.
- In top gear, the LHC will generate nearly a billion collisions per second. Above ground, a farm of 3,000 computers, will rapidly crunch this number down to about 100 collisions that are of the most interest. The data will then be sent out to a grid of institutions and universities around the world for analysis – a sort of mini-World Wide Web of its own.
- The tunnel is the world's largest fridge, with parts reaching a temperature as low as -271ºC, which is colder than deep space.
- The detectors are Herculean in scale. The biggest, called ATLAS, is 46 metres long and 25 metres high, or about half the size of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. At 7,000 tonnes, ATLAS weighs almost as much as the Eiffel Tower, and has 3,000 km of cabling. Nearly 300,000 tonnes of rock were dug to house ATLAS and 50,000 tonnes of concrete were poured. In one year, ATLAS will generate 3,200 terabytes of raw data, equivalent to 160 times the three billion books in the U.S. Library of Congress.
- In the course of a 10-hour experiment, a beam might travel more than 10 billion kilometres, enough to get to Neptune and back. At full intensity, each beam will have the equivalent energy of a car travelling at 1,600 km/h. The LHC will use up 120 megawatts of power, equal to all the households in the Geneva area.
- LHC collisions will generate 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV), amounting to a high concentration of energy but only at an extraordinarily tiny scale. One TeV is the equivalent energy of motion of a flying mosquito.
- Some physicists have wondered whether the LHC will produce minute black holes and nasty (but so far entirely theoretical) phenomena called strangelets that would reduce Earth to a lump of hot, strange matter. CERN says any black holes would be so weak that they could not exert sufficient gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter. As for strangelets, CERN points out that Earth is battered by cosmic rays of much higher energy intensities, but the planet is still here.
- The price tag for building the LHC is put at 6.03 billion Swiss francs (A$6.5 billion), two-thirds of which went into materials and a third into paying for an army of thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians to design and install it.
this is the greatest website ever
I went on this site because one of my coworkers walked by my desk and told me the earth was going to end on September 10th because France is going to fire up an atom smashing machine. Thank God I found this site. If this site's chat room is a sample of the people running this death machine in France I am relieved that I will not have to watch the Yankees not make the postseason.
FIRE IT UP FRENCHIE!!!
here here
here here
Never Fear
Don't be silly, WTF!
Anonymous posts to a web site by anyone willing to pass comment is hardly a history of the "best brains of our time arguing the toss over whether religion or science rules".
I'd argue that those with even a nominally higher intelligence instantly see the frivolity of attempting any sort of serious discussion in such an indistinct forum.
Let the show begin
LHC is a tool for scientist to verify their theories, and it costs billions of dollars/euros !
Who pays that ? You me.
What do they find ? They improve their theory of physics, but it's only theory. It's like mathematics.
So it's billions of dollars poured in a big "SHOW", kind of huge fireworks.
LHC will contaminate Earth
The black holes and other particles produced by the LHC are way too small to be contained in Cern. The operation of the LHC for decades will contaminate Earth irrevocably with those particles.
Marie Curie, for instance, was certainly the most knowledgeable person about radiation of her time. But she was entirely oblivious to the contamination of her own body by what she studied. Up to now her original papers and even her cookbook are considered too dangerous to be touched with bare hands.
Now, those scientists who have assessed the safety of the LHC for sure are the most knowledgeable of our time. But then again they may not know a thing about the risks posed by their experiments.
Here we go again, the "apple of knowledge" how god did it, is presented to us. Will we bite it ?
olaf ciachowski
let the bickering / controversy continue
Even if the context of the comments is not exactly what people came to read or if they thought that different scientific minds would chat amicably over an almost 10 billion dollar project, well at least this is further information. I would like the banter to continue because it motivates more minds to join in. This is such a complex subject that I dont think there is a complete RIGHT definition for the be all end all matter of the subject, ha MATTER LOL . Alright so from further coversation right, wrong, or indifferent further content will be spawned so please by all means I would like to hear any and all input including educated guesses, this is extremely intresting. Thanks William
this was copied from anopther site please comment
Monday September 1, 2008, 6:51 am
I am most concerned about the LHC 2009+ program schedule (once financed) at CERN. A pre-planned decade 2009-2019 of precision energy upgrades, and especially the ALICE heavy Lead (Pb) ion collision experiments, which create hyper-density luminosities (super-dense plasma glow fields of energy). At 14 trillion electron volts (TeV) could become what Einstein and several other scientists noted, a 'boundary layer' of gravitational reaction at an unknown energy level. A gravitational curvature leading into a compression singularity vortex; thus producing an expanding quantum wormhole known as the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. The quantum wormhole has a brother/sister relationship to the blackhole formations. Stephen Hawking has studied both intensely, and is currently uncertain in regard to 'Hawking Radiation', and it's dissipation effects upon stabilizing micro-blackholes (MBH) or similar type quantum wormholes! Opponents of these warnings would like to pretend this is no more dangerous than two flashlights turned toward each other, but fortunately there are not that many who are naive. The LHC has been designed and built upon the current interpretations of the 'Standard Model', and these experiments are designed to test that model! Within the ocean of mathematical conjecture that has been overlaid upon the 'Standard Model', if there are any miscalculations or subtle misinterpretations, then your guess becomes as good as any current scientific guess available, as to what these outcomes shall be!!!
Continuing the controversy
Imagine for a moment - and this isn't even too far fetched -that humans had once before many many light-years ago already invented an LHC that went terribly wrong, created a black hole and swallowed up the whole of the universe.
By then as we have now, space stations and what seem to us - alien ships - were also actually in production and used to escape by some of the humans then, as we have now and those humans were even more brilliant than us now and thus those humans took the time to take enough care to have hidden the Higgs boson (God Matter) from future humans (us now). Then as we know, evolution is a circle and we have strageley come back to square 1 - and thus a square can be infact a circle as is the construction of the LHC tunnel? If this is true then we are going around in circles as we have known for years and years and lightyears too.
Euge - Australia
I agree with euge. But
I agree with euge. But you've gotta wonder what those people on the space stations/ships are thinking as they drift about aimlessly looking up/down/into us: probably something along the lines of "oh shit oh shit oh shit, we shudda curbed their enthusiasm early, when they just messing about with fire"
wow
im no science expert or anything but i think this is the best experiment to have come from man kind.
everything that has been on the news has just been to scare people etc etc. if people actually read the articles from scientists they might understand.
THE TABLOIDS ARE WRITTEN FROM RUMOURS
everyone knows that.
but i just want to say a massive well done to everyone involved!
and....
if we do all die then, so what were all dead!! new life can begin.
good luck
x