CERN's Large Hadron Collider started -- are we still here? (updated with video)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Sep 10th 2008 3:48AM
posted Sep 10th 2008 3:48AM
Hello? Tap, tap, tap, this thing on?
CERN's $9 billion, 17-mile long atom smasher was just turned on and we're awaiting reports on how the tests have gone. The Large Hadron Collider did experience "small electrical problems" overnight. However, these were not expected to delay the first test firing at 9:30am CEST. As such, the clockwise and counter-clockwise firing of particles should already be in progress.
Remember, no smashing will be done today, for that we'll have to wait until later this month. We'll update you here as things progress.
09:49 -- Confirmed, the first beam of protons has been fired! It took 48-seconds for the pulse to generate and then a tiny flash of light on a computer screen indicated a successful firing around the first 3-km of the 27-km ring -- they will methodically extend the range throughout the day.
10:25 -- The beam just completed the full ring (in stages) in less than an hour. Things are going much more quickly than expected. Counterclockwise test next.
12:18 -- CERN estimates that the LHC will be fully operational for physics work in the next few months. Added NASA-like video of the reaction to the full-loop, first beam success after the break (watch for two flashes on the left-most screen).
Note: Insert, the following string into VLC to watch live: mms://qstream-live.qbrick.com/00862live80910
Read -- small electrical issues
Read -- webcast (currently down)
Read -- First beam fired
CERN's $9 billion, 17-mile long atom smasher was just turned on and we're awaiting reports on how the tests have gone. The Large Hadron Collider did experience "small electrical problems" overnight. However, these were not expected to delay the first test firing at 9:30am CEST. As such, the clockwise and counter-clockwise firing of particles should already be in progress.
Remember, no smashing will be done today, for that we'll have to wait until later this month. We'll update you here as things progress.
09:49 -- Confirmed, the first beam of protons has been fired! It took 48-seconds for the pulse to generate and then a tiny flash of light on a computer screen indicated a successful firing around the first 3-km of the 27-km ring -- they will methodically extend the range throughout the day.
10:25 -- The beam just completed the full ring (in stages) in less than an hour. Things are going much more quickly than expected. Counterclockwise test next.
12:18 -- CERN estimates that the LHC will be fully operational for physics work in the next few months. Added NASA-like video of the reaction to the full-loop, first beam success after the break (watch for two flashes on the left-most screen).
Note: Insert, the following string into VLC to watch live: mms://qstream-live.qbrick.com/00862live80910
Read -- small electrical issues
Read -- webcast (currently down)
Read -- First beam fired
I think I'm still here, you?
Nope. I'm not here.
I'm sorta here. I'm watching the Apple Keynote
I can confirm the UK still exists but, with Gordon Brown in charge, it hasn't got long...
when Pepsi starts to sponsored LHC? lol.
Whats happening - I CAN'T GET INTO ANYTHING
SOMEONE PLEASE UPDATE ME
OH YES - I AM STILL HERE IN SUNNY JOHANNESBURG
I don't know if I'm still here, but I do know who is still there: http://i34.tinypic.com/33e31c9.jpg
:)
I feel safe.. ;)
Why does the display on my monitor keep twisting counterclockwise?
Those of you worth your geek-salt will have already read this, but for the benefit of lesser geeks, follow this link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/10/lhc_day_is_not_today/
This thing got me Laid, I told this hot chick that today would possibly be the end of everything and asked to have some sexy time fun and she said yes. And I thought I wasn't going to get LAID this summer. Thanks LHC!! keep smashing those particles cause it helps me lots. I made something else "Collide" last night. Thanks again.
My fingers tips are disintegrating and going into another dimension even as I type.
First of all noone said the black holes would swallow the earth instantly... If you have done any research at all you will know it will take years to even notice the black holes because they start out so small and gather mass very slowly...
reporting from Belgium: just checked and everything still seems to be here. Or there. Except I can't find my socks, but I don't think we can blame CERN for that.
They haven't actually started collisions guys. The conspiracy theorists aren't going away until that happens.
Here is really helpful website that elaborates on the subject: http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
@ RV
Thats the point. They can not tell that they are there for a long period of time, and some people (conspiracy theorists) believe that a black hole, noticed or unnoticed, could some how throw off the Earths gravitation somehow. Now I'm not a Physicist or anything but that seems just as bad as being eaten by a black hole, and I dont know much more about this topic so do be to mad, after all we all "stand of the shoulders of giants".
So I guess Chuck Norris is there to kick all manner of headcrab ass.
were all still here because CERN HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN!!!!!!!
http://digg.com/general_sciences/CERN_Supercollider_SHUTDOWN
They've been sucked into the black hole, hence the reason the screen is black.
honestly what could this thing do it's not gonna make a black hole but if u fell inn and started going that fast...
Punctuation my friend... commas love you.
i think his commas are the first casualty of the LHC
greetings this is wall-e...........
I'm dissapearing into the abyss :3
It's actually 26 km
Metric FTW
26 659 m. If you want to nitpick, at least do it properly.
oh on the history channel there is a show about this if u get u don't vaporize u it's touch ur dead:)
What? I got the first part of that sentence, but then it sort of tailed off in to those random grunts you make in your sleep
Or were you actually being vapourised whilst typing?
It's actually a funny quote.
Announcer: "So what happens if you were to get hit by the beam [of photons, or something]? Would you vaporize?"
CERN Physicist: "No, you'd just die. Fairly quickly."
This stream works if you're interested: http://wwwc.aftonbladet.se/special/webbtv/wmlive/wmp6.html
You can use VLC to open the stream
mms://qstream-live.qbrick.com/00862live80910
Tried it and it worked.
BBC Radio 4 is also streaming live from the LHC today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
Don't cross the streams!
First beam of photons? Someone turned on a flashlight?
Protons, Engadget, protons!
Then why didn't they call it the Large Boson Collider?
Because it collides hadrons, not bosons. Bosons are the results of the collisions.
Duuhh!!
Dolly Parton has access to the Large Bosom Collider.
Which will be best for us all?
When they create a small black hole which grows exponentially and destroy us all or when fail every time they try.
Pewpew!
Pretty scary that the webcast went down right after launch, isnt it?
objects with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light.
iSpidey and Superzune will save the world!
I wonder how fast a person could go in whatever magnetically powered capsule before G forces become detrimental. I figure the longer the donut shaped tube the less the G forces, allowing much faster speeds, maybe even approaching the speed of light.
Actually what I meant was, How fast could a person go in a circle before G force became detrimental. I figure the longer the circular tube, the faster speed can be reached before G forces cause havoc.
To use a very long circular tube would be feasible allowing speeds to continually increase without running out of runway, so to speak. A straight path wouldn't be feasible because it would have to be so long as to allow the desired speeds to be reached.
The math is easy - radius and speed are sufficient to figure G's.
Gordon Freeman?
Prepare for unforeseen consequences...
Oh come on they don't want the world t know if something does go wrong because it would create fear in people and then god only knows what people would do in numbers if they w scared... Look ive seen The Mist as many of us have & yes please roll your eyes... they said it could lead t the discovery of different dimensions but what if they open a damn door by mistake & they can't close the damn thing then what :( thr is no telling what will happen or what has already happen & im sure if it hasn't happen yet im sure something will before it becomes a big problem but when it does we are all going t pay for what these idiots are doing which is playing around like thr GODS..... These guys are opening Pandora's Box!!! :( May God help us all if thr wrong.... The Unknown should be left the unknown if its for the safety of The Human race :(
once this thing starts colliding protons next month, it will be the end of us.
Cherish your final remaining moments with your loved ones...
I still keep on typo-ing "hardon collider" into google... :(
Oh. The jokes. So many.
I'm waiting for the inevitable porn.
even worse is "large hardon collider"
When this thing starts colliding protons at the speed of light next month, it will destroy us.
Cherish your final moments with your loved ones....
Imagine if this gives some sort of definite answer to human existence...damn religion will be pissed cos they wouldn't be able to evade taxes no more.
This can't disprove any religious beliefs because nothing can. Its impossible to prove that something does not exist, you can only prove that things do exist. i.e. a ghost, if i see one thats proof that it does exist but if i never see one that just means i never saw one; not that it does not exist. So religion will continue to evade taxes.... They really did think it through when they made it up so i gotta give em some credit, lol.
AMEN JASON!
wait.......
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You do exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
About the Babel Fish and God - Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
So... is Chuck Norris there to roundhouse kick the blackholes if they pop up?
Damn, I spent 10 minutes of work time trying to find out what Chuck Norris was doing there at the Hadron event. 5 pages of Google search and Wikipedia did not tell me anything. Before I spend the whole day trying to find out, could anybody pls tell me if Chuck Norris was there at the event and why?
Thank you! :)
I think he's there hoping the damn thing will open a portal into an earlier time... you know... before he became the crypt keeper and no longer mattered.
@Prokanda
You might want to preemptively call 9-1-1 now.
http://kuvaton.com/bshit/1220360595652.jpg and http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
that man has a ridiculous tie.
Confirmed, there is internet in Heaven and Engadget loads quickly. I'm gonna go have a pint with a few saints. See you all soon!
How's the Broadband in Heaven? Would you say that it's hellishly fast? I'll bet Hell is still running on 2400 baud Dial-up.
Well to everyone thats still alive .... actually I will let my friend here tell it for me. Peace!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4RY-eJgHHs&feature=related
THEY HAVE A BEAM!
Sorry.
Apology not accepted, Phil.
Very cool.
I'd like to witness this scientific triumph, but the video won't even stream. Wait, does this mean... *gasp* The end has come! XD
I dont hear questions either, only answers in that stream :/
BREAKING NEWS : sky smash 2 pork pies together in CERN's Large Hadron Collider built in studio !
Sorry Mince pies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZ46zs78qs
Live webcast chick: First time in a while I've gotten excited about science, if only grade 11 physics was this fun.
I'm open for some collisions anytime :)
I woke up with tricep tendonitis and am blaming this LHC thing.
Live webcast chick taking questions before: First time in a while I've gotten excited about science, if only grade 11 physics was this fun.
I'm open for some collisions anytime :)
Aww, man. It's even funnier the second time.
I'm still under the impression that this thing is one giant ass iPod... with a 17 mile diameter click wheel... still waiting for the new Hadron Collider Nano.
m8 i got the new hadron collider nano :)
Dear ALL,
Another thing i want you to notice about the worlds biggest science experiment of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) or Particle accelerator in which will smash protons one of the building blocks of matter into each other in a LHC which is biggest machine housed in a 27 km long tunnel buried under 100 meters of rock.
Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles (the protons) will travel in opposite directions at the speed of light and collide with each other to generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a minuscule space.
Then think what will be happened? many scientists are saying that the experiment will create a black hole and which will grow uncontrollably and eat the planet from the inside!
But i have here some dought!!
I may link this LHC experiment to your mail about ' Sun will rise for 36 hours on 17th October 2008'!!
Have you watched to science fiction movie "The Core" if not then watch it! in that same thing happens, earth core slows down and about to stop rotating, and scientists then reach to core and make nuclear blast within the core to stabilize it. and thus earth starts its usual rotation again!
So, i don't think that 8000 scientists and 30 nations come together and invest billions of dollars just to know what happened at the time of 'BIG BANG'
Regards!
Vishvas Avachat.
Dear IDIOT
You are wrong,
Regards !
Jensh.
You're basing your knowledge about particle physics off of an action movie that co-starred DJ Qualls and Stanely Tucci? Best of luck to you in all your future endeavors, Vishwas.
I bought an iPod Touch today ;-)
I didn't buy an iPod Touch today. :)
We are all actually already inside of the black hole....
Oh, you missed the point, all of you!
The Large Hadron Collider makes a lot easier the smuggling between Switzerland and France.
As we speak, the scientists exchange the first lots of French wine and Swiss cheese. Bootleg French recipes will follow soon, as well as fine chocolate. Army knives, however, might be banned due to the large magnetic fields.
i'm very excited....
all dogs in accra have started running in clockwise and anticlockwise circles all day.......it seems as if their internal balance has been disrupted
*sigh*
Making jokes about the LHC is cool.
Making comments about your hopes for it, or in support of it, is cool.
Making comments about whether or not there are other appropriate avenues of research that the money should have been spent on instead - after all, it is really expensive - is cool.
Genuinely asking what the point of it is, because you don't understand and would like to, is cool.
Even making comments to the effect that money spent on scientific research is wasted and should be spent on something else is at least open for debate. It's a topic that can be argued.
However, fear-mongering based on a chain email you received or a badly-written "news" report designed to make people scared so they'll read the story and see the adverts , or making comments about physics when it's patently obvious that you really know next to nothing about physics, or making comments based on "well, in the movies scientists are always mad and running earth-destroying experiments, so I guess that's like real-life" is just silly. It's the equivalent of coming on Engadget and complaining that ADM's new 37 nanny-meter process will turn all the mountains in the world into a great sentient super-computer because you heard they "grow" silicon and that will get out of control and eat the planet. Or that those idiots who work in IT are much more stupid then you are because we should have "1000 jiga-quad" computers by now, it was on Star Trek. For anyone who actually knows something about the topic, it is just painful to read.
There is a lot of hubris here, but it's not with the scientists at the LHC. It's with the people who assume that we are so powerful as a species that we can destroy whole planets. The LHC uses a lot of power, sure - but on the scale of the whole planet it's a tiny blip. It's like worrying that an oil refinery on fire might melt the entire Earth - the scale is completely different.
At it's very most powerful, it will be running particle collisions less than 0.01% as powerful as the particle collisions that happen at the top of our atmosphere many times a day, every day, for the last few billion years. They haven't destroyed the Earth yet - so why should this?
Remember, scientists rarely go into the field for the incredible cosmic power they achieve. Nor do they, in spite of being labelled "elitist" by politicians, often receive multi-million salaries, drive ferraris or have the ear of top politicians (it always amazes me that a school teacher or a research assistant in a university is regarded as being part of a powerful 'elite' that dominates society and that Fortune 500 CEOs and politicians from Ivy-league schools born with trust funds but who own a ranch in Texas are regarded as 'normal', 'like-to-have-a-beer-with' folks). These scientists are regular people - and if they felt there was any risk to the planet, they'd never switch it on. They have families too, you know.
The final argument that people use is "well, we don't understand everything, you never know, they shouldn't take the risk". It's appealing on the surface, but acting on the principle that everything you know might be wrong so don't do anything, just in case, would paralyze us completely. It's the same as arguing that we don't know if some wierd sound harmonic might not crack open the fabric of space-time and destroy the universe, so we shouldn't sing ever just in case. Well, you never know - after all, everything we know about science could be wrong and just because there has been several billion years of noises without anything happening doesn't mean that it might not happen now! It's a silly argument when applied to something you know about - and for those who know about the LHC, it's just as silly when applied there.
I believe you need to see this http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/venting.png
> *sigh*...
Good Lord, you mean it really COULD end the world!?
Yikes!
Wait a minute!
If an oil refinery catches fire it will melt the whole world!? I'm sending an e-mail to my grandfather right now so that he may forward this information to everybody he's ever met. I'm sure he can fit that in along with that e-mail he keeps recirculating with the photos from the UAE indoor ski-slopes, horribly misinformed "facts" about foreign oil, and how to remote-start your car with a cellphone.
/hysteria
All of you are idiots. The smashing ISN'T today. Why would the earth end if they were just sending protons around a big ring? Wait until the real smashing starts, then say that agsim.
This was a triumph...
I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It's "hadr" to overstate my satisfaction.
It appears that the Media has frightened the people to death with the notion that today the world may end. I had numerous calls over the last 7-days from family and contacts asking what will happen on Wednesday 10th Sept. I told them absolutely nothing. In fact some people who I had considered previously level-headed were literally unhinged about the whole matter.
But the worst part of this media hype is that the collision of protons does not actually happen until October. Therefore in their quest to sell newspapers they have literally conned the people, as today was no more than switching on the electrical systems and testing if protons would travel the 17 miles long system at CERN.
When October comes, the Media will again most likely frighten everyone to death again, just in the quest to sell their goods. Isn't it time therefore that the Media got their facts right and apologized to the people who they have conned - their readers. Indeed one guy had a letter posted in the Guardian stating that it was their last publication. Therefore one has to ask, has the Guardian also lost their marbles ?
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation Charity (WIFC)
Bern, Switzerland
this is the media we're talking about here
engadget's coverage of this story was just showed on sky news! yah!