The Register wrote:There were emotional scenes last night at the headquarters of underground international atom-smasher science alliance CERN, as joyful boffins celebrated the successful restarting of the Large Hadron Collider. The colossal machine circulated its first beam around the entire 27-km supermagnet circuit at 22:01 Swiss time, and sent the opposing beam round the other way at midnight.
Previous days had seen control-room boffins overcome a couple of late-breaking technical hiccups. One, described by enthusiastic amateur LHC-watcher Chris Stephens - of LHC Portal fame - as "an oopsie", saw a loss of cryogenics take out two sectors of the mighty doughnut on Thursday night. Then at the last minute a "quenchino" held matters up for a short interval.
The main CERN control room was described as being pervaded by "an unnatural sense of calm" at first; but as last night's long-awaited technical triumph neared, facilities all around CERN filled with jubilant boffins. Cerebral celebrations were thought to have continued until late into the night among some, but others, exhausted by working late all week, took a well-earned rest ("heavy night of magnet circuit testing", noted one of the team on Thursday morning).
It's important to note, especially for those concerned that the LHC may destroy the world and/or entire universe - perhaps in some fashion involving inept handling of artificially created black holes, or possibly the transmutation of entire planets into soup - that beam circulation is not the real deal. The Collider has as yet done no colliding, where the two beams - racing in opposite directions at almost the speed of light - are crossed, producing sub-subatomic particulate prangs of such violence as to mangle the very fabric of time and space.
Much more likely than the destruction of the universe, according to top CERN brainbox Sergio Bertolucci, is that the LHC will open up a "door" into some kind of extradimensional continuum. "Something might come through" says Bertolucci, or alternatively we might sent something through to the other side.
Bertolucci says that the portal can only open for an unimaginably brief instant, and will be of a smallness difficult to express. But mistakes have been made before, and many of our readers - tooled up with a selection of improvised portal-monster-busting weaponry and in some cases clad in reassuring tinfoil headgear - have barricaded themselves into impromptu strongholds just in case.
We'd say it's OK to come out for a while, though, as the CERN schedule doesn't call for any actual collisions until December 3 at the last look. Naturally we'll be covering the story for as long as there's a planet Earth to report from. Or until the demons, aliens, genetic hive legions or parallel globo-Reich Nazis catch up with us, anyway
Short article in the spoiler.
Whats everyones opinions on this, i'd rather them not do it. Life is precious, and for some people to go and destroy the world is just really annoying & selfish to even think about.I see both the advantages and the dis-advantages of this experiment, the advantages being we shall learn some ground-breaking information which shall better us and the dis-advantage being the world shall end. My opinion is just leave stuff that you don't know alone, unless it doesn't threaten the end of humanity
Last edited by Baron Zemo on Sat Nov 21, 2009 1:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Trinity wrote:All nonsense really. Lot of money wasted when there are people dying from Chromobacterium violaceum infection.
It's not wasted because the money has only been raised for that purpose. If you used that logic you could say that money spent on ANYTHING is a waste if it isn't spent on the sick and hungry
If the Higg's Boon or the graviton are found it will be a very worthwhile experiment. I personally can't wait to find out the results. Then again i am a physicist...
If all we ever spent money on was the bare essentials humanity would never move forward in the more fundamental sciences as most people see it as unnecessary. I also see things like this and the space program as great for inspiring people to take up science.
~Earl Grey~ wrote:What will knowing the Higgs boson exists do for us? Will we be able to create forces from nothing?
I'm sure people said similar sorts of things when looking for atoms, and then subatomic particles. Engineering tends to lag behind cutting edge physics by a few decades but I'm confident that such a discovery will one day find a practical use.
~Earl Grey~ wrote:What will knowing the Higgs boson exists do for us? Will we be able to create forces from nothing?
When an engineer looks at a hammer, he doesn't think "hmm what can I use this for?" and then starts hammering the gooseberry fool out of everything he can find. He looks to build or create or fix or do whatever and then uses the tools provided to achieve his goal. Notice I didn't say "she uses it to achieve her goal".
Who knows what the knowledge of how the universe works will do for us, but knowledge is powerful tool.