LHC switched on!!

Like a star arriving on stage, impatiently followed by each member of CERN personnel and by millions of eyes around the world, the first beam of protons has circulated in the LHC. After years in the making and months of increasing anticipation, today the work of hundreds of people has borne fruit. WELL DONE to all!

Successfully steered around the 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10:28 this morning, this first beam of protons circulating in the ring marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. "It’s a fantastic moment," said the LHC project leader Lyn Evans, "we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe".

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be introduced, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.

"The LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, "its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself."

Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton’s description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature’s preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.

Born in the minds of a few pioneers and dreamt of by a large community of physicists, as of today the LHC is a reality.

Hey guys take a look at this..
http://cdspages.web.cern.ch/cdspages/1125472.htm

Simulated Big Bang..makes us nervous..!!

Isn't there a concern about black hole simulation,where it might devour us all,just assumptive alarm,but if I wanna die,getting sucked into a black hole is a way to go.

please allow me to add on something...since I am not very understand how LHC works, and I looked from wiki:

Quote :

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons) with very high kinetic energy.

Quote :

More generally, physicists hope that the LHC will enhance their ability to answer the following questions:
-Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories?
-What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?

Quote :

The total cost of the project is expected to be €3.2–6.4 billion.

Thx to withoutwax for sharing with us.......

Yup~~dat's rite bout LHC

They've ard injected beams of protons into the machine..have to let them circulate for almost a year before banging simulating a Big Bang...

Sit back and watch the show guys~~haha

I wonder why do need to have that spinning thing
Is that going to accelerate it? If that's so, how fast? speed of light I suppose?

lol...well..spinning thing?? u mean that circular tunnel??
Erm..i dunno whether i noe bout the magnetic force and circular motion before..if u can recall..

F magnetic=Bqv
F circular = mv^2 /r
so..combine together..Bqv=mv^2 /r

Which means..they creates powerful magnetic field across the circular loop..to make the protons circulating the ring..not consuming much space..(you dun wan to use up the whole earth to accelerate a small lil single proton.do you?)

The protons can achieve 99.99% speed of light..this is WOW!! i can say!!

Ah physic...lol I don't remember.

Y must it be circular then? y not linear? Space concern?

Anyway when it is going to running at full power? Any chances of broadcasting in M'sia?

rage wrote:

Ah physic...lol I don't remember.

Y must it be circular then? y not linear? Space concern?

Anyway when it is going to running at full power? Any chances of broadcasting in M'sia?

The tunnel is circular so,the particle can move in it forever without hitting a wall or something.Broadcast in M'sia,maybe this will get 3 minutes in Berita Utama.

Quote :

-Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories?

Check this out,it got everything you need to know about these stuffs,

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

I find the information in about elementary particles is very enlightning.

withoutwax wrote:

F magnetic=Bqv
F circular = mv^2 /r
so..combine together..Bqv=mv^2 /r

>.<....formula .....erm, i suppose i return back to the teacher ad...

Quote :

MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 1:25 p.m. ET Sept. 19, 2008
GENEVA - After a widely heralded startup, the world's largest particle collider has suffered two malfunctions in the past week — setting off two separate rounds of troubleshooting.

The first problem with the Large Hadron Collider occurred within hours of the $10 billion project's official launch on Sept. 10, but the operators at Europe's CERN particle-physics center didn't make the glitch public for a week.

The collider was briefly brought back into operation on Thursday, but sensors detected a large helium leak from the device's cooling system during testing on Friday. That forced another shutdown, and an investigation of the problem was expected to continue through the weekend.

CERN spokesman James Gillies told msnbc.com that no one was in the collider's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel when the mishaps occurred. CERN still plans to begin collisions at the LHC sometime in the next few weeks, he said.

The first glitch, on Sept. 11, involved the breakdown of a 30-ton transformer that cools part of the collider. When the transformer malfunctioned, operating temperatures rose from below 2 Kelvin to 4.5 Kelvin (-456.1 to -451.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The warmer level is still extraordinarily cold by most standards, but above the collider's normal operating temperature.

That forced a days-long shutdown. The faulty transformer was replaced, and the magnet ring was cooled back down to its operating temperature.

Gillies said the machine was "back up and running" on Thursday. However, the collider's monitoring system detected a helium leak in one of the collider tunnel's sectors on Friday while technicians were testing the electrical circuitry for that sector, he said. The collider's magnets rose to temperatures in the neighborhood of 100 Kelvin (-279.7 degrees F), and the system was shut down again for an investigation.

Gillies said the circuit test likely caused the leak, but the precise cause was not immediately known. "There are several thousand amps of current [in the circuitry], so it's very high current," he said.

hysicists said it isn't that surprising that problems would occur in the process of getting a huge and immensely complicated collection of equipment like the Large Hadron Collider up and running smoothly.

"This is arguably the largest machine built by humankind, is incredibly complex, and involves components of varying ages and origins, so I'm not at all surprised to hear of some glitches," Steve Giddings, physics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "It's a real challenge requiring incredible talent, brain power and coordination to get it running."

Judith Jackson, spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., echoed that view.

"We know how complex and extraordinary it is to start up one of these machines. No one's built one of these before and in the process of starting it up there will inevitably be glitches," she said.

Fermilab is home to the Tevatron, an accelerator that collides protons and antiprotons in a 4-mile-long underground ring to allow physicists to study subatomic particles. Until the LHC's startup, the Tevatron was the world's most powerful particle collider.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to collide protons in the beams so that they shatter and reveal more about the makeup of matter and the universe.

After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam. Scientists said the beam made several hundred circuits around the ring.

On the evening of Sept. 11, scientists had succeeded in controlling the counterclockwise beam with equipment that keeps the protons in the tightly bunched stream that will be needed for collisions, but then the transformer failed and the system was shut down, the statement said.

This report includes information from msnbc.com and The Associated Press.

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26780393/

THOSE sci people are crazy.... they goin 2 make another
DARK HOLE (not that hole) scarrrrrrrrrrrry

I hope they can find out the smallest being (Higgs)
thx to the world largest phySICK exp

69tribe is seriously the grandmaster. Did we say anything about the 'hole' ? lolz how ironic ~

69tribe wrote:

THOSE sci people are crazy.... they goin 2 make another
DARK HOLE (not that hole) scarrrrrrrrrrrry

I hope they can find out the smallest being (Higgs)
thx to the world largest phySICK exp

You're always imagining hole isn't it?

Actually the black hole effect has no proof at all..it's not logic..even if the effect even exist..it's negligible..and to suck up the whole earth..takes milions of years..

Hmm maybe they shud come up with a version that can create blackholes

Then we can use it as weapon if there's an alien invasion

Lol..before that they must understand the mechanism behind blackhole 1st..which is so damn complex..and must be able to manipulate it..switch on and off at a particular time..lol..look forward for this kind of weapon..(where does all the sucked-in objects and soldiers go then?? hmm...against the principal of conservation of energy~)

withoutwax wrote:

Lol..before that they must understand the mechanism behind blackhole 1st..which is so damn complex..and must be able to manipulate it..switch on and off at a particular time..lol..look forward for this kind of weapon..(where does all the sucked-in objects and soldiers go then?? hmm...against the principal of conservation of energy~)

To the singularity,to the point where both relativity and quantum mechanics fail to explain,you want create a black hole as weapon? You think you can control such force?

Who gives a damn to where it goes? As long as it eliminates the enemy and not ourselves . lolz

Well not likely to be able to control such force fully. Maybe partially enough to be able to manipulate it size? Lol I seems to be imagining too much stuff lately. Well...its holiday

rage wrote:

Who gives a damn to where it goes? As long as it eliminates the enemy and not ourselves . lolz

Well not likely to be able to control such force fully. Maybe partially enough to be able to manipulate it size? Lol I seems to be imagining too much stuff lately. Well...its holiday

Unless we are some kind 'Star Wars' empire and able to say 'oops..that went wrong,and blowed the solar system." or something,we can use black hole as weapon..lol..