Giant atom-smasher poised for restart: CERN

[ArtVandolay]

GENEVA (AFP) – The world's biggest atom-smasher, which was shut down soon after its inauguration amid technical faults, is set to restart this weekend, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said on Friday.
The first beam of sub-atomic particles are expected to be injected into the Large Hadron Collider "early Saturday morning," CERN spokesman James Gillies told AFP, while adding that the timing was not set in stone.


Nestled inside a 27-km long tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the LHC promises to unlock scientific mysteries about the creation of the Universe and the fundamental nature of matter.


But the machine was shut down just nine days after its inauguration last September following a series of technical faults.
Since then, the LHC's components had been tested to an energy equivalent of five teraelectronvolts at full power.
The maximum output of what is currently the largest functioning collider in the world, at the Fermilab near Chicago in the United States, is one teraelectronvolt.
CERN had said in August that upon its relaunch, the LHC will run at 3.5 teraelectronvolts in order to allow its operators to gain experience of running the machine.


The first data should be collected a few weeks after the first particle beam is fired.
CERN said the partial power level will be kept until "a significant data sample has been gathered" and ramped up thereafter.
Designed to shed light on the origins of the universe, the LHC at CERN took nearly 20 years to complete and cost six billion Swiss francs (3.9 billion euros, 4.9 billion dollars) to build.

 

[ArtVandolay]

Relatedly...



November 7, 2009

(ChattahBox) — In another cosmic turn of the surreal, the Large Hadron Collider -LHC the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator (16.8 mile), suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette dropped by a passing bird, landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring. The controversial device, housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky “Higgs boson” entity, also called the “God Particle” which give “things” their mass.
In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this latest incident could have caused a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. On Sept. 19, 2008, just days after the Hadron’s launch, a small piece of electrical cable providing power to the magnets broke loose, sending a shower of sparks across the wiring, causing a year-long breakdown
The failure of LHC to get to full particle-smashing so far is a relief to some scientists, who fear the experiment could cause several tiny black holes to form, which would grow and devour the entire Earth. The succession of technical problems the LHC has suffered has led yet other physicists, like Dr. Holger Bech Neilson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen speculating that the manufacture of Higgs bosons may be so “abhorrent” to nature,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, that their creation would cause ripples backward through time to stop the collider before it could produce one, much like the paradox of a time traveler going back in time to halt his own birth by killing his grandfather.

 

[legalize_freedom]

Thats an interesting post! And props to the little bird!, maybe mother nature is trying to tell these brainiacs something!

 

[Dr. Manny Bowles]

We're all gonna die!

 

[BlueNose]

Can humans build anything that isn't complete crap these days?

 

[PencilHead]

I knew something was awry--woke up this morning and had a big black hole in my tin foil hat.

 

[nvthis]

Hey Art, any idea where I can get a 5 teraelectronvolt hps for my flower room? My flower room has gotten a bit large, but I am thinking 5 should do. What do you think?

 

[ArtVandolay]

Hey Art, any idea where I can get a 5 teraelectronvolt hps for my flower room? My flower room has gotten a bit large, but I am thinking 5 should do. What do you think?

I would think that would do it, nv :hubba:. Should light up the sky just like in that Saving Grace movie :hubba:. Maybe you want to start with Fermilab one teraelectronvolt hps just to get it dialed in and get a feel for the heat issues and stuff? Be sure you warn me before you fire it up :hubba:

 

[ArtVandolay]

Can humans build anything that isn't complete crap these days?

:rofl:

 

[umbra]

I wish I could have taken some photos of the things I've worked on. Art you would love 'em. The ICF reactor at Livermore was awesome.

 

[ArtVandolay]

:hubba: Sounds interesting, umbra :hubba:. I couldn't even google up anything I could understand about it :hubba:.

Are we talking inertial confinement fusion (ICF)? I hope not because that's a little over my head LMAO

 

[ArtVandolay]

Europe: Proton beams circulate in Big Bang machine


GENEVA – Scientists switched on the world's largest atom smasher Friday night for the first time since the $10 billion machine suffered a spectacular failure more than a year ago.

It took a year of repairs before beams of protons circulated late Friday in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.

Circulation of the beams was a significant leap forward. The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.

Progress on restarting the machine, on the border between Switzerland and France, went faster than expected Friday evening and the first beam started circulating in a clockwise direction around the machine about 10 p.m., said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

"Some of the scientists had gone home and had to be called back in," Gillies told The Associated Press.

The exact time of the start of the Large Hadron Collider was difficult to predict because it was based on how long it took to perform steps along the way, and in the end it happened about nine hours earlier than expected, Gillies said.

This is an important milestone on the road toward scientific at the LHC, which are expected in 2010, he said.

The scientists have started preparing to circulate another beam in the opposite direction within the coming hours, Gillies said.

"It's great to see beam circulating in the LHC again," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "We've still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we're well on the way."

With great fanfare, CERN circulated its first beams Sept. 10, 2008. But the machine was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to massive superconducting magnets and other parts of the collider, in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

CERN has $40 million on repairs and improvements on the machine to avoid a repetition.

"The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators. "We've learned from our experience and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That's how progress is made."

The LHC is expected soon to be running with more energy the world's current most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. It is supposed to keep ramping up to seven times the energy of Fermilab in coming years.

This will allow the collisions between protons on the machine to give insights into dark matter and what gives mass to other particles, and to show what matter was in the microseconds of rapid cooling after the Big Bang that many scientists theorize marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.

 

[legalize_freedom]

We're all gonna die!

yep!:holysheep:

 

[viper]

yeah , the U.S abandoned their project called superconductor super collider in the early 90s after 14 miles of tunneling were completed and 2 billion dollars were spent , the labratory was located south of dallas tx .

 

[dirtyolsouth]

Hey Gang...

This whole deal has really caught me with my pants down... I had barely started working on my tin foil hat when they announced that the collider was up and operating. I was still doing R & D & fabricating the anti gravity dome but I got it together now and I'm ready for ANYthing...

The way I see it, if we got some atoms just laying around we might as well just smash 'em... It's all worth if if they are able to separate the pigmenations of the marijuana plant and get the proper data coordinates into the spectral chromographic analyzer... Ya know, it's all fun and games until an careless bird looses their lunch & drops a crumb...

Obviously in the entire super collider compound tin foil hats are mandatory... the dude below is in charge of all technical operations...

Blinded by Science!

 

[Super Silver Haze]

Art, i remember all the hype about the consequence of LHC starting up so i kept up on it waiting to hear of black holes being created but nada. i do remember seeing a news report of 4 large earthquakes after the LHC went on line. the earthquakes were, if i remember correctly, all substantial and when shown on a map they seemed on opposite sides of the earth from each other. i dont know if the LHC could cause earthquakes but neither do any of the experts working there. anyway, ill reverse engineer my tinfoil pipe and fashion it into a hat.

 

[nvthis]

It's all worth if if they are able to separate the pigmenations of the marijuana plant and get the proper data coordinates into the spectral chromographic analyzer...

Whoa man! I think that big LHC thingy is turning us all into Aplaisias!! :doh: :shocked:

 

[The Effen Gee]

Can humans build anything that isn't complete crap these days?

yes.

Guns, guns and more videogames that rule.

...I hope it swallows the whole world. I hope that tiny minority of experts who think a black hole that is a nanometer across can swallow our lanet whole are dead on.

we're ruining it ne-ways, why not?

 

[nvthis]

I hope it swallows the whole world. I hope that tiny minority of experts who think a black hole that is a nanometer across can swallow our lanet whole are dead on.

we're ruining it ne-ways, why not?

I'm no expert, but I think that is impossible. Dead mass is what drives a blackhole. I don't think a microscopic blackhole could retain the kind of mass it would take to keep it functioning, especially when it takes the utter distruction and mass of an entire star to build one, as we know it. Microscopic blackholes are purely an idea generated by a man that has never even studied a real blackhole, let alone seen one.

 

[The Effen Gee]

A couple things:

A black hole is not "Dead" mass, as in our universe matter cannot be destroyed. It can only be altered from one form to another. Truth is, we don't really know what a black hole is, where they go and what exactly they are composed of. I believe they can cross the space between our universe, or dimension and another. Very little is known about black holes and I doubt that one generated in CERN will eat the planet. It is my understanding that a black hole is total lack of mass, from a collapsed star. Forces and numbers that our human brains have a hard time encompassing. They seem to devour mass, as if there is an unsatiable void, or lack of mass. Perhaps the matter from the star, through forces not yet understood, "collapsed through the barrier" between our known universe and another. Hopefully. Perhaps they are someting more ominous.

I hope not though, as every galaxy, even our own is spiraling towards a mega-black hole in the center of our galaxy.
I believe there are images that exist of a planet being devoured by a black hole.

Hopefully with this machine we can understand more about our universe, how it was formed intitally and possibly other unforseen outcomes. Like dimensional travel.

...maybe one day.
Go science! Save us from ourselves, or make a quick end of it all.
One or the other, please.

...it would be pretty sick to see from a distance though. Perhaps ET knows when we are going to fire it up and are getting good seats for the show.