Short Film About CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Lobster911 writes "Seedmagazine.com has posted a new film, Lords of the Ring, about CERN's Large Hadron Collider. NESTA fellow Alom Shaha takes us through the world's largest machine, as he lets the scientists who work at CERN explain the LHC and what they hope to accomplish with it. The highly-anticipated collider is set to start up in 2007, running at full speed by 2008."

Re:Basic research is often hard to justify

[PIPBoy3000]

I decided to expand the topic a bit, talking about both benefits and risks. There has been some discussion about the risks of the collider. From the wikipedia article: [wikipedia.org]

It has been predicted by Savas Dimopoulos and Greg Landsberg that if the scale of quantum gravity is near 1 TeV, then the LHC may produce black holes.[5] Due to a concern for public safety, CERN performed a study to investigate whether dangerous events such as the creation of micro black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles could occur.[6] The report indicates that none of these events will pose any risk: micro black holes are specifically stated to be harmless due to the Hawking radiation process. Frank Wilczek at Princeton University has stated in an article in Scientific American that cosmic ray collisions occur at much higher energies than may be found in manmade particle accelerators today, so it is unlikely that a particle accelerator would produce a dangerous black hole. However, some physicists and members of the general public remain concerned about the safety of the LHC. Wilczek states that strangelet creation and expansion is very improbable but not impossible.[7] John Nelson at Birmingham University stated of the RHIC that "it is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk - but I could not prove it."[8] In academia there is some question of whether Hawking radiation is correct.[9]

Rumor has it that during the first A-bomb test, the scientists were taking bets on whether they'd ignite the atmosphere. I wonder what the odds of creating a black hole might be?

Re:Unimportant

[Martin Blank]

Edward Teller had a concern about atmospheric nitrogen undergoing fusion, essentially igniting the entire atmosphere. He got together with a couple of other Manhattan Project physicists and showed that it was not just unlikely, but impossible. With this concern laid to rest, they knew that it was safe (so to speak) to detonate the bomb.

It was one of the other physicists (not the ones with whom Teller collaborated on the above report) who kept talking about it afterward, and allowed the story to live on, much to the annoyance of a number of Manhattan Project researchers.

Re:I wrote a little poem...

[Dusty]

FWIW Cern [web.cern.ch] is in Switzerland, just outside of Geneva. Although the LHC ring is large enough to cross the border into France.

Re:Low content

[boingo82]

You're probably being facetious, but see The Church's homepage [venganza.org].

Re:I wrote a little poem...

[Kesch]

Switzerland... Sweden... Same diff.

(I actually did look it up while composing, I just wasn't thinking.)

LHC@Home

[schmiddy]

If you'd like to pitch in yourself and help the LHC project, running LHC@Home [lhcathome.cern.ch] is a great way! They use your CPU cycles to simulate particles traveling in the LHC. The server might be out of work units at the moment, but there are, of course, other cool projects that use the same BOINC client that you might not have heard of, like Einstein @ Home [uwm.edu] that helps the LIGO project searching for gravity waves.

Re:OK, jokes are fine, but . . .

[deander2]

these type of high energy particle collisions are happening all around us all the time. (esp. as you get into the upper atmosphere, as they rain down on us from space) surely if they could produce black holes that could destroy the earth they would have done so already.

this machine will only reproduce these collisions in very controlled conditions, letting us learn from them.

btw, this is not a concern i've ever heard an actual physicist raise. all theories of micro black holes predict they burn themselves out as fast as they are created, as there is a critical mass needed for self-sustainment. i have doubts regarding the reliability of your "science" blog.

Re:a little hasty

[Anonymous Coward]

After attending a workshop at Harvard I was informed that segfaulting is normal behavior at the end of a reconstruction run?

The thing that should be kept fairly reliable is the recording of data. With that stage, it is important to do the work quickly and reliably. And of course if the software does crash, it is important to pick up and keep going after that.

What you are working with is probably what's called the "offline" software. It's not as important to get it working so soon. And if it crashes on reconstucting some events, it's no biggie. Just ignore those events. Presumably it will crash during simulated events with the same frequency that it crashes during real events (if the simulation is any good), and so there will not be much systematic bias introduced.

Also take note that I am an undergrad writing software to align the muon spectrometer, they must be behind...

No. The reason to involve undergrads is so that they will learn, and some of them will go on to become graduate students, then postdocs, then research scientists or professors. It's a kind of apprenticeship. If you had only have the experts doing all the work, then all the expertise would be lost within a generation or two.