Atom Smasher - Death of Us All

The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground.

But more than the $8 billion price tag is riding on the LHC.

Depending on what's detected, physicists may find out if they understand the fundamental building blocks of nature, or if "everything that physicists have been talking about for 45 years is wrong," says CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis.

It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

Although a few individuals have questioned the safety of the planned experiments at the LHC in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no basis for any conceivable threat.

The question: Will the world end on Wednesday when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on? | Science | The Guardian

Legal bid to stop CERN atom smasher from 'destroying the world' - Telegraph

The Associated Press: CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang

Two words: We're f**ked.:perplexed:

wow i havent heard of this... but thats crazy

why would you want to reinact the big bang? to PROVE it happened? what will that change?

like people who still study time travel.. though i bet its impossible anyway, but what good would come? cept rippin the space time continuum or causing effects like in the movie the time machine and on the futurama movie... and what about the grandfaher effect... silly humans

it's only the difference between drinking yourself to death and putting a nickel plated 9mm to your temple and blowing your brains out. the latter just has more class!

Well, we're still alive.

Expensive, but interesting invention. I'm happy to see it up and running. Hope we learn something for our billions of dollars in investment.

In 1897 J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, using a kind of particle accelerator, a cathode ray tube, that accelerated a beam of negatively charged particles between electrical terminals and made a phosphorescent green glow around the positive terminal. (Wilhelm Roentgen had used this same device in 1895 in his discovery of the particle beams that gave us x-ray technology.) Cathode ray tubes using this same principle of particle acceleration now sit in television sets in hundreds of millions of American homes, and illuminate the screens of millions of computers and scientific and medical instruments.

In 1909, students in the laboratory of physicist Ernest Rutherford directed alpha particles from a lump of decaying radium at sheets of gold foil. The unexpected way the particles scattered when they hit the foil led Rutherford to the discovery of the atomic nucleus in 1911. Rutherford's discovery was a scientific leap forward. However, no one, least of all Rutherford himself, foresaw the enormous consequences it would have. Rutherford is reported to have said, "Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine." He made his statement five years before the first demonstration of nuclear fission. Rutherford's words have an ironic ring in a world transformed by nuclear energy.

In the 1920s, increasing data from experimental discoveries about the nature of the atom led to the theory of the structure and behavior of atoms we call quantum mechanics, and to an utterly new understanding of nature. From this new knowledge came lasers and solar cells and, in 1947, the discovery of the transistor, the basis of all modern electronics and the age of information.

Synchrotron radiation has become an indispensable tool for thousands of researchers in such fields as materials science and engineering, surface chemistry, biotechnology, medical imaging and environmental science.

In the 1930s, Lawrence often kept the cyclotron in Berkeley running all night in order to produce enough radioisotopes for California hospitals to use in treating cancer. He began a tradition of using accelerators for medical diagnosis and treatment. Today, patients receive cancer treatment using beams of neutrons produced by accelerators whose main job is to produce protons for physics research. In another therapeutic approach, doctors at Loma Linda University Medical Center now treat over 100 cancer patients each day with protons from a synchrotron designed and built at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Medical facilities around the world are investigating this technology. Linear electron accelerators in thousands of hospitals around the world treat millions of cancer patients every year.

Computer-aided tomography, the CAT scan, perhaps the most significant advance in medical radiography since the 1895 discovery of x-rays, originated in particle detection methods developed by high-energy physicists. The underlying magnet technology for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) came from particle physics research. Positron Emission Tomography (the PET scan) uses crystals of a material developed for high-energy physics particle detectors.

Geneva, 18 September 2008. After a spectacular start on 10 September, the LHC enjoyed a mixed first week of commissioning with beam. To get beams around the ring in both directions on the first day exceeded all expectations, and the success continued through the night, with several hundred orbits being achieved.

The next step in the commissioning process is to bring in the radio-frequency (RF) system that keeps the beams bunched, rather than spreading out around the ring, and will eventually accelerate them to 7 TeV. The RF system works by 'capturing' the beam, speeding up the slower moving particles and slowing down the faster ones so that the beam remains bunched into fine threads about 11 cm long. Without it, the beam quickly dissipates and cannot be used for physics.

On Thursday night, 11 September, beam two, the anti-clockwise beam, was captured and circulated for over half an hour before being safely extracted from the LHC. The next step is to repeat the process for beam one, and that is set to begin this week.

The intervening time has been spent recovering cryogenic conditions after the failure of a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC switched off the main compressors of the cryogenics for two sectors of the machine. The transformer, weighing 30 tonnes and with a rating of 12 MVA, was exchanged over the weekend. During this process, the cryogenics system was put into a standby mode with the two sectors kept at around 4.5 K. Since the beginning of the week the cryogenics team have been busy re-cooling the magnets and preparing for operation with beam, which is currently forecast for today. The next stage of the commissioning will be single turn studies using beam one, followed by RF capture and circulating beam in both rings.

The LHC is on course for first collisions in a matter of weeks. Next update 24 September at the latest.

So if we're to get killed by what the LHC is doing it will still probably be a couple of weeks before it happens. Of course, we're not supposed to get killed, the physicists say.

Does anyone else find it priceless that the cutting edge of physics consists in smashing things together like a toddler? I think the Large Hardon Collider reflects pretty well how deep we've dug and how much further there is to go.

Yeah, the scientists have basically laughed off suggestions that this thing could kill us. Which is why I don't worry about the matter. Besides, if they are wrong, we wont have enough time to notice before we are all compressed into a singularity.

Incident in LHC sector 34
Geneva, 20 September 2008. During commissioning (without beam) of the final LHC sector (sector 34) at high current for operation at 5 TeV, an incident occurred at mid-day on Friday 19 September resulting in a large helium leak into the tunnel. Preliminary investigations indicate that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure. CERN 's strict safety regulations ensured that at no time was there any risk to people.

A full investigation is underway, but it is already clear that the sector will have to be warmed up for repairs to take place. This implies a minimum of two months down time for LHC operation. For the same fault, not uncommon in a normally conducting machine, the repair time would be a matter of days.

Further details will be made available as soon as they are known.

wow i havent heard of this... but thats crazy

why would you want to reinact the big bang? to PROVE it happened? what will that change?

like people who still study time travel.. though i bet its impossible anyway, but what good would come? cept rippin the space time continuum or causing effects like in the movie the time machine and on the futurama movie... and what about the grandfaher effect... silly humans!!!