Short Film About CERN's Large Hadron Collider 179
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."
Low content (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, jokes are fine, but . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I read on a theoretical physics blog (yes, there are such things) that there is a fear that this LHC might actually generate black holes.
link [columbia.edu]
Now that could make things very interesting, for a short time. .
Wouldn't it be interesting... (Score:1, Interesting)
a little hasty (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting professional history... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lest we forget ... (Score:4, Interesting)
America's Discarded Superconducting Supercollider: [damninteresting.com]
Anyone know what the total cost will be? The U.S. version was supposed to top $US 8 billion, and I saw something about a U.S. government grant of $US 500 million in the late 90s. Curious to know if there were lessons learned and if the approach wound up making more fiscal sense.
&laz;
Re:OK, jokes are fine, but . . . (Score:1, Interesting)
Hawking radiation has never been observed (the process which you are betting litteraly Earth on). It stands to reason that the black holes have infinitesimal reaction cross-sections at high velocities (this is your cosmic ray argument), but all cosmic ray events would result in a blackhole with escape velocity and no ability to have an elastic collision to slow it down. But some of the particles from the ring will not have escape velocity and if there is no Hawking radiation, will simply hang around earth until there is no earth or they interact and make the whole place one big black hole.
I'd give better than million to one odds that we will be fine. But judgeing odds that far out gets hard, and the question I have is, why bet the whole place? Why not wait a few centuries and bet mars?
Re:a little hasty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OK, jokes are fine, but . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
That would actually be ultra cool. A black hole would evaporate in a minute fraction of a second, giving off a very different signature than the expected quark-gluon plasma. If that were the case, physicists would get insight towards new physics, like string theory - the first experimental data about it. It seems, however, that chances are slim.
Also, a black hole is the most efficient way of converting mass into energy. Think about that.
Re:Not to bash physicists, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
The reality is that there are a number of good reasons to be doing this. There are an enormous number of tech spinoffs that result (you're using one of them). Medical, industrial, informatics, etc - we're solving problems (out of necessity) that the rest of the world hasn't even run into yet. The data rate from one detector is greater than every human being on Earth having 20 phone conversations at once.
We're one of the reasons that the internet was developed to its present form.
But mostly that's good for telling politicians why to fund us, so they can do cost-benefit analyses with Beltway bandits and justify the expenditure to the OMB without being scalped. The real reason for all this is
We Are Not Human Beings If We Don't Explore.
We become sheep. We surf the web and watch network TV and do stuff that is fun but stagnant. Or stuff that is not fun and even more stagnant.
Poking at the fundamental levels of our knowledge is quite different from Googling the result - and takes time, money and expertise. These questions we're asking right now - we're asking them because we hunger for the real story. Fortunately, it's relatively cheap to do so. 5 billion in national terms is the price of a nice dinner in personal terms. In international terms, it's chump change. We'd do it cheaper if we could - but it's hard to examine things a octillion time smaller than you.
We pay it - though there are worthy causes that could benefit from that cash - because succumbing to stagnation is to deny who we are, to turn our backs on the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders we stand, and to declare as a civilization that we're done looking forward - we're happy with what we are now. We roll over and go to sleep.
I stand for something better.