Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that most epic triumph of human engineering and physics research has finally taken place, and
strangely enough our planet's still in one piece too. The search for the
Higgs boson particle resumed yesterday, somewhere under the Franco-Swiss border, with the CERN research team successfully executing what the
LHC was built to do -- accelerating proton beams to nearly the speed of light, then filming the wreckage as they crash into each other. Having encountered a number of
bumps in the road, the researchers have had to significantly
scale down the energy at which their early collisions will take place, with the very first ones said to have happened at 900 billion electron volts. Still, plans are afoot for an imminent shift up to 1.2 trillion electron volts (TeV), which would be the highest energy level any particle accelerator has achieved yet, before a ramp up to 7 TeV over the coming year if all goes well.
posted November 24th 2009 4:42AM
when you're looking for the BIG Bang you gotta start small .. Nice work CERN
This really is history in the making, most people don't realize the fact, certainly not the jesus crowd.
*Tears up*
::phew::
@(Unverified) That was my first thought too.
@(Unverified)
Do you think that it will get up to 7 (TeV) on/around 2012....I knew it
kryptonite, i say, kryptonite!
can it accelerate something bigger than an atom?
like say... a human?
@(Unverified)
Only if you can get a human into those pipes.
@(Unverified)
Simple. You just need a punctiform human in a vacuum at 1 K.
@(Unverified) If the human carried a net charge this would definitely be possible.
the Higgs Boson particle is insignificant next to the power of the force. Obi wan was wise to hide it from us. Now his failure is compl*BANG*-end-of-world-kthxbye.
Gee, I don't know what all the fuss is about, everyone knows you just need 1.21 Gigawatts and 88mph.
@Honza Jiggawats, actually ;)
Ill stick with my Stargate. Thank you.
Great Scott!
@Honza: Yeah, but in Switzerland you've gotta get it up to 142 kph.
I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by
Giggawatts is fine and can actually be pronounced either way. Jiggawatts is just silly.
And a bit of plutonium seems easier to come by than a giant ring of naquadah and a precisely timed solar flare. Though both the DeLorean and the Stargate have enough style points :D
@John Stracke
kph is kilo per hour ???
km/h is kilometer per hour ! lol
is emotional
@(Unverified)
It's Gigawatts, the G is pronounced like a J when saying it. Thanks for coming, try again.
Some people do drugs, real geeks just destroy atoms and threaten the universe as we know it.
Gotta get your kicks somewhere
yaaaay, now...what does it all mean...??
@qwerty
pretty much nothing. other accelerators have done collisions with this much power before. They're just ramping it up slowly. Once we cross the 2TeV barrier on the way to 7-8TeV (which is what the LHC was designed to do) we'll start seeing cool stuff.
Sounds like they arn't seeing a return for all this effort yet. End of the world my ***
but can it etch Crysis???
And as the Creators of Half-Life make money of their games, they had the great idea of making the first game turn real life.
I hope someone makes a Gravity Gun, those wooden crates with my health packs aren't gonna break them self's
Can't wait to meet Alex tho!
@(Unverified) "You just need a punctiform human" -- Here, hold still.
halalooia, and the say humen arnet best creatures on the universe
W2G CERN
And Aliens we are ready
@(Unverified) imbecile
Don't worry. As long as they hit that wire with the connecting hook at precisely 88mph the instant the lightning strikes the tower... everything will be fine.
Time circuits on. Flux Capacitor... fluxxing. Engine running. All right!
It's fun seeing nerds celebrate.
bring on the resonance cascade, i want my own lamar!
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal-msw.html
I was fired from the project for using the proton beam to make a grilled cheese sandwich.
We all know they arent destroying anything till 2012.... relax!
Well, I'm glad it didn't create a mini black hole ------ this time.
I would hate to be their inventory manager.
Can somebody explaiin the potential for the LHC? What do we stand to benefit? Will we finally have flying cars?
@(Unverified)
We can understand how matter is made, and we could perhaps create a machine that can create any matter that we want. Like an alchemist, you could produce as much gold you want out of any other molecules, putting in some electricity, combining them a bit and out comes whatever you want.
We may also design much faster computers, more efficient electronics, we could discover a 4th dimension and start understanding how to use that to our advantage. For example a time machine, traveling in space at the speed of light, all that is possible. And flying cars as well.
Actually, the 4th dimension is time. In order to actually test for dimensions higher than that we would need what is called Planck energy. This is 4 quadrillion times more energy than we will every be able to produce with the LHC. What this thing is hoped to do is verify the existence of the Higgs Boson. This particle is predicted by string theory but has not yet been detected by lesser accelerators.
There are no practical applications even if we do detect one of these. Just the baby steps towards understanding where matter comes from and such.
Particle acceleration gives me a large hadron.
The time circuits must have been malfunctioning again
I don't even know why, but when I read that headline, I had a huge burst of fear go through me, and actually shuddered. I never even believed any of the black hole crap, and nobody else was in the room. Maybe we actually should be scared of this thing.
@ttsgeb We should never, ever be afraid to learn, to know, or to confirm what we do not know.
It is the essential reason why we are here.
And Pie. To discover the nature of how the natural world works...and pie.
So why almost the speed of light? Why cant they fire the protons the speed of light, or faster?
@thebomb E=MC^2 postulates that as an object approaches the speed of light its mass would become..... why am I wasting my time.... RTFM
@thebomb they couldnt even get anything to go the speed of light???? I can do that right now!!
The speed of the particles must be causing a reality distortion field that makes it look like these folks are wasting screen real-estate on the big display!