Sciencemadness Discussion Board - CERN Supercollider

CERN Supercollider

Sauron - 10-9-2008 at 12:15

I'm surprised this has not been discussed. It is monumental news, unfortunately the media are going shallow and stupid with talk of destroying the planet, creating a black hole, and focusing on the "God particle".

The simple fact is that no one really knows what to expect from the ramping up of energies at CERN, over the next year or so. Hopefully we will (as a species) learn a lot, and the nations involved will get their money's worth. B-movie sci-fi outcomes are unlikely. Will they finally observe the boson? No one knows. If they do it will probably be indirectly as some sort of trace on a sheet of film which will only cause the hearts oh high energy physicists to fibrillate.

Projects of this scale, scope and ambition are few.

Because it's not worth it's own thread in miscellaneous

franklyn - 10-9-2008 at 12:59

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=11036&...

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Sauron - 10-9-2008 at 14:17

In your opinion, only.

kclo4 - 10-9-2008 at 17:04

To bad nothing is going to be happening that is exciting and likley to lead to discovery for the next few months.

I wish they could just crank it up to 7 TeV already!

Haha ever hear the idiots babble about how the world is going to end in 2012?

"The Super Large Hadron Collider (SLHC) is a proposed upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider to be made around 2012."

bfesser - 10-9-2008 at 18:49

Heh, I was wondering when someone was going to post about the LHC's first beam today.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR...

not_important - 10-9-2008 at 18:53

Quote:

Haha ever hear the idiots babble about how the world is going to end in 2012?

They need a resource such as these:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

bfesser - 10-9-2008 at 18:56

Quote:

Originally posted by not_important
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Read the source code of this page. Plenty of comments.

PainKilla - 10-9-2008 at 19:14

Results are going to be quite interesting when they emerge... this definitely deserves it's own thread, but I suspect only a few can really have meaningful discussion (I'm not one of them).

[Edited on 10-9-2008 by PainKilla]

large_hadron_collider.png - 82kB

Sauron - 10-9-2008 at 19:49

Read Michener's novel SPACE, and Sagan's CONTACT

Or follow the pillorying of James Watson.

When science and the mass media collide, idiocy results.

There are still those who believe the earth is flat.

There are still those who insist the world is 5500 years old.

There are still those who believe the space program was faked on a Hollywood sound stage.

And even within science there are plenty who cry that 9 billions ought to have gone to their own sacred cows instead of (whatever). Funding is not a zero sum game.

"Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain."

franklyn - 16-9-2008 at 06:46

Quote:

Originally posted by Sauron
There are still those who insist the world is 5500 years old.
"Against stupidity the gods them selves struggle in vain."

It could very well be 5500 years, but it can never be proved nor disproved
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1356&a...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/15/uk.church.darwin....

The Anglican church of England issued an apology yesterday to Charles Darwin.
Apparently it was deemed that the former criticism by the church clergy of the
naturalist pioneer and his theory on the origin of species had been unwarranted.
Reminds me of the similar case of Galileo Galilei who's censure for his espousal of
the Copernican understanding of the solar system was deemed subversive. He
was reprieved by the Roman Catholic church - four centuries afterwards. Earlier,
a contemporary of his, Giordano Bruno, more adamant in his heretical leaning, was
harshly denunciated at an impromptu barbecue held just for him. His martyrdom
still awaits a rebuke by the ecclesiastic authority. Don't you just love it when
sinners repent.

.

chemoleo - 19-9-2008 at 15:11

Here's a good video on how it works (for laymen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc&feature=relat...

chemoleo - 20-9-2008 at 06:46

Apparently the collider has shut down, due to quenching (heating up) of a superconducting magnet. 2 months down time.

The beam is at 7 Tera electronvolts, so the combined power when two beams hit each other is 14 TeV. Each proton has the mass of a 7000 if I understand this correctly.
In this article http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,579431,00.h... (German unfortunately) they state that such an uncontrolled particle beam would 'rip deep holes into the ground' - hence people are not allowed into the underground chambers containing the beam, whilst running.

I wonder how they calculate this, or visualise what would actually happen to physical objects. Sounds like a good weapon too were it not for the scale...

12AX7 - 20-9-2008 at 09:10

Quote:

Originally posted by chemoleo
The beam is at 7 Tera electronvolts, so the combined power when two beams hit each other is 14 TeV. Each proton has the mass of a 7000 if I understand this correctly.

A 7000 what? 7000 protons? Mass is mass, it doesn't change. Protons are 936 MeV/c^2 rest mass energy, period. Kinetic plus rest-mass is what's at 7TeV (of course RME is negligible as these are ultrarelativistic speeds).

Quote:

In this article http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,579431,00.h... (German unfortunately) they state that such an uncontrolled particle beam would 'rip deep holes into the ground' - hence people are not allowed into the underground chambers containing the beam, whilst running.

I wonder how they calculate this, or visualise what would actually happen to physical objects. Sounds like a good weapon too were it not for the scale...

The graphite stop block they were shooting the test beam into absorbs a considerable amount of energy from the beam. Graphite isn't too dense with respect to 7TeV particles, or even the what, 500GeV beam they were starting with, so the particles just kind of skip right on through it, colliding here and there, releasing streams of products (nuclear bric-a-brac, displaced electrons, pair production, etc.) and so on. Shot into air, it would make an impressive blue beam as the air is ionized (hell, the protons have more kinetic energy than anything in the air has RME), how long I don't know but probably pretty good. Into anything, really, it'll cut pretty far. The sheer energy will vaporize anything in its path, so holding it in one place on a graphite or tungsten block will do quite nicely to burn a hole in it. Hah, and if not by vaporization, then by nuclear spallation!

Tim

chemoleo - 20-9-2008 at 17:52

Well in the video link I posted above, they seem to correlate the number of GeV or TeV with mass at relativistic speed - and they said that a proton has the mass of 7000 protons at this speed so close to light. Obviously the closer you ramp up the speed to that of c, the greater the mass - but I do not know the mathematical correlation between mass, speed and energy under relativistic conditions. My physics knowledge goes as far as the Lorentz time dilation. Explained very nicely by the way (including a mathematical derivation) in Michio Kaku's book Hyperspace. Anyway, I have no further knowledge in this, but if you know a source that contains an understandable derivation of these correlations for an average mathematician like myself then let me know.
The beam must be physically pretty powerful, they stated in the article above that it has to be split first into many subbeams before it is neutralised in a massive graphite block. Perhaps they use graphite (rather than lead) because less dangerous isotopes of carbon and lower/higher elements can only form, which are less harmful (however you want to define harmful here) than those i.e. formed with other heavier elements? But I'm speculating.

PS what is RME?

12AX7 - 20-9-2008 at 18:56

I bet they chose carbon for its high melting point, moderate conductivity and low Z. Carbon and hydrogen (like water) are typical choices for a neutron moderator (neutron weighs almost the same as a proton) because they exchange momentum reasonably well; a heavy element like tungsten results in more elastic collisions instead. And sure, the isotope problem, plenty of spallation going on at that energy. Get the nucleus moving and its bulkiness and strong charge give it some good drag through the crystal lattice.

Of course fission neutrons are only a few MeV tops, maybe 80MeV absolute maximum, a whopping four orders of magnitude away from this thing. So the demands are a bit bigger.

RME = Rest Mass Energy

Tim

[Edited on 9-20-2008 by 12AX7]

Rosco Bodine - 25-9-2008 at 00:04

Well pimp my superconducting supercollider :cool:

Word.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

chemoleo - 25-9-2008 at 15:54

Actually the rap video is surprisingly informative and amusing!

Anyway here an interesting clip on the history of CERN and the LHC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SARgkwczvAE&feature=user