http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article1630897.ece

I don't know enough about the experiment to give my opinion on whether or not they should go through with this.. but if they do I bet we could learn a lot and maybe take us to a new age of technology.

Consider the source. Useful if your MIB.

Otherwise

While I am slightly concerned about this, couldn't you have gotten a better link than the effing Sun? It's honestly the worst of all the tabloids.

haha. The sun.

Funny, I thought they used the Large Hadron Collider weeks ago.

Well seeing that I've never heard of 'the sun' before I wouldn't know.

You can tell its awful by looking at the quality of the site.

Um, Hawkings radiation? duh.

hate to dampen everything but there won't be any intentional collisions on the 10th, probably won't be any until the end of the month.

The 10th is just when we will get full circulation of the beam around the whole ring (hopefully) and start ramping up to 5 TeV per beam energy. ( we'll hit 7 TeV after the winter shut down).

The beams will need a lot of work to get them contained and under control, just one of the beams if "dumped" can start melting nearly a ton of solid copper in a few seconds, just to give you an idea of it's strength. So we really don't want the beam out of control going through parts of our very very precious detectors.

The actual beam dump was (last I heard) a big chunk of graphite which will reach temperatures upto around 2200 C during operation and still remain far far too hot for people to go into it's room during the life of the experiment. (long shut downs not included, I guess) They also do a lot of de-focusing of the beams before they dump them to spread the energy out over the surface a bit, otherwise I think they would just go straight through.

LHCb (special b-physics experiment) actually has put parts of it's inner most detector on a retracter (sp?) so during the first few weeks it's not so close to the beam, because otherwise there is a very good chance it'll get burnt to bits they even built a second one because they are so sure it will be

So don't worry about the world ending on the 10th, it'll more likely happen near the end of September, beginning of October when we actually start colliding the beams

and tbh, all this talk of black holes, just ignore it folks, it's exceptionally unlikely to happen and even if it does they won't live long enough to worry about. The press have just blown it all out of proportion.

When we start getting collisions I'll give you all an update with hopefully some pretty pictures from the event display of ATLAS

and if your really lucky a screenshot of the oh-so exciting silicon tracker DAQ+DCS screen which I'll be looking after...yawn....

[edit] that article sucked btw and Professor Otto Rossler (one of the folks who are arguing for the experiment not to run) is a god damn biochemist (no offence to biochemists) so what the **** does he know about high energy particle physics??? probably diddley squat!! [/edit]

James, I'm glad someone with your typing skills is running a physics experiment of such magnitude

Anyway, if we do destroy everything, who's going to be around to complain?

Oh please. Micro black holes are harmless. Black holes radiate at a rate inversely related to their size, that is, the smaller they are, the faster they dissipate. Micro black holes simply don't survive long enough to grow. We're talking about things on the scale of a single atom smashed into zero space. It might have zero volume, but it still just has the mass of a single atom.

my typing sucks I know, heck my english and grammar skills suck almost as much and you really don't want to see my hand writing...I have trouble reading what the **** I wrote sometimes.

I was going to type something to this effect, also with a nod to JB.

Hooray for other people!

This is so cool, James. Please do keep us updated.

Also, please don't become a mad scientist.

The Sun is there.

yeah, that's for the informative post about this thing. How do you know so much about it?

he works at CERN.

Those ****er scientists better not throw me through a black hole 3 days before my birthday damnit!

Aw, I was all excited too.

Hahaha, the whole 'LHC may create a black hole and destroy the world!' story has been around for a while, I think it originated with two physicists in Hawaii. It's sort of a running gag around our Physics department.

The particle physics team in our department are working on the ATLAS experiment, and have designed some of the equipment and will be analysing a lot of the data from ATLAS. It's pretty cool, but it's a responsibility shared by thousands of teams at Universities across the world thanks to the ingenious system called The Grid.
As the World Wide Web originated at CERN, it is perfectly possible that The Grid will form the basis for new telecommunications technology.

Particle physics is an excellent example of science investigating abstract and seemingly fruitless questions, and pushing technology forwards to do so which eventually trickles into the mainstream and has entirely unexpected and unforseen benefits to society.

I do quite like the list of 9 things to do before the world ends. I'm adding some of those onto my own bucket list.

Also, for those of you not familiar with The Sun, it's basically our equivalent of Fox News but with more boobies.

Except fox news isn't a tabloid.

yes it is.

look at the thing they aren't trying to create black holes

THEY ARE BUILDING A DEATHSTAR

I lol'd

The death star is impossible. Somehow the 'lasers' meet, and change direction. WTF.

it is if there is a fancy system of prisms and mirrors. >.> <.<

Except there wasn't. There was just SPACE.

I expect to see no real benefits of this experiment, other than possibly inflating Steven Hawkings already inflated ego.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Then there's the issue of a beam of EM radiation causing a planet, which is basically a huge hunk of molten iron, to explode at close to the speed to light as well as apparently vaporizing it along the way.

And that's just some of the issues with Death Star, not to mention the rest of the SW universe. We know it's not physically accurate, there's no need to pick at jokes like that.

So if we find the higgs boson can we finally have repulsorlifts?

maybe it was highly energetic xenon plasma or some sh*t like that?

( i say xenon cos it was green)

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

?

We better save the cheerleader then.

It's alright man, you're way smarter than I am at fizzicks and such. Just poking fun.

Stephen Hawkings really doesn't have anything to do with the LHC. ;

Now give the man a damn crowbar!

hahahaha..

Yes, we talk about chemistry too. You can imagine what that's like.

This is the link to the display which will be updated on the fly on 10 Sept to see how far the beam has got...

http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/beam/by_beam.php

He has to lose some weight and get a nose job before the experiments start!