British Scientist to End World on Wednesday

Lol, thats awsome :LOL::LOL:

I had heard the rap existed but hadn't got around to watching it yet. Amazingly, I think I learned a few things from it!!
 
digitalwanderer said:
But I didn't see any crowbars! :oops:

That rap is good, but Brian Cox's lecture really explains everything better. Between the two I almost feel like I know what's going on. (I'm now a huuuuge Brian Cox junky, the man has a gift for making the insanely complex easy to understand. :) )

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html
Click to expand...

Ahh, him! I haven;t watched the talk yet but I saw a documentary about this presented by him on BBC4 the other day. I agree he seems like a pretty cool guy.
 
pjbliverpool said:
Ahh, him! I haven;t watched the talk yet but I saw a documentary about this presented by him on BBC4 the other day. I agree he seems like a pretty cool guy.
Click to expand...

He was in some band before his career as a physicist. D'ream I think it was, did the silly "things can only get better" tune that New Labour used during their 1997 election campaign.
 
nutball said:
He was in some band before his career as a physicist. D'ream I think it was, did the silly "things can only get better" tune that New Labour used during their 1997 election campaign.
Click to expand...

Lol, thats one crazy combination of careers!!

Come to think of it, that guy has worked in the 2 areas I want to work in most... lucky b*stard! ;)

Rgd the talk, I agree its a very good. The discovery of Supersymetry particles sounds like one of the most interesting possibilities to come form the LHC. If it can explain what dark matter is composed of... well thats pretty exciting!

Also, apologies to the religious folk, but that creation story really is amazing, obviously I know the high level details already but to see it described as a creation story to be considered alongside Genesis and all the rest really puts into perspective how amazing it is. Frankly I can't imagine why anyone would choose to believe a religion based creation story when the scientific alternative is so much more elegant and fastinating. And hell, it still leaves the door wide open for the existance of a God!
 
It's going well so far. :D

The biggest and most expensive civilian experiment in the history of science is finally underway.

At 9.28am UK time, the control room at the CERN laboratory erupted into cheers and applause as a pair of dots on a computer screen showed that a beam of particles had successfully completed its first lap of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the £3.6 billion “Big Bang machine” that will open a new window on the Universe.

It took less than an hour to guide the stream of particles around its inaugural circuit: the first protons had been fired into the 27km ring at 8.32am.

“Thank you, thank you everyone,” said Lyn Evans, project leader of the LHC, as the beam finished its first lap.

Almost an hour earlier, scientists endured an anxious 48-second wait between the generation of the first pulse of protons, and a tiny flash of light on a screen that showed the beam had made it around the first 3km of the ring.

The LHC team then steered the beam of protons around the entire circuit, stopping it at points along the way to correct their aim. By 8.55am, the beam was half way around, passing through the first four of the atom-smasher’s eight sectors.

“Wow!” Dr Evans exclaimed, as it emerged that the beam had completed its first half-lap just 26 minutes after the insertion process began.

“The beam is now half way around the LHC, and it’s been through two experiments, ALICE and CMS. CMS has seen some beautiful tracks. We’ve now stopped the beam and we’re making some corrections, and then we’ll move around octant by octant. We’ve got four more to do. At the rate we’re going, within an hour we’ll have the beam all around the LHC.”

Beam-stoppers, or absorbing blocks, were being used to prevent the beam from passing too far along the narrow vacuum tube, which has the diameter of a 50p piece, before scientists think they have pointed it correctly. These were being progressively removed, until protons could circulate.

Once the LHC’s clockwise beam had been inserted, scientists moved on to the anti-clockwise beam in the afternoon. Shortly after 2pm, the second stream of particles was also making its way around the collider.

The next challenge is to “capture” both beams, so they fire in neat 2mm pulses, and to fine-tune them. Then the LHC will move on to collide the two, to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. There will be no collisions today, but it is possible that some trial collisions will be performed as early as next week, to help scientists to calibrate their detectors.
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RussSchultz said:
http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
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Lol :LOL:

To be fair though, its not going to be able to destroy the world (by anyones estimate) until they turn it up to full power. What they are doing at today and for the next few weeks has been done before at other colliders.

Not that I think this is going to destroy the world of course but the chances are probably better than winning the lottery....

Worth the risk IMO. Better to go out trying to expand out knowledge than in a nuclear war or super plague!
 
pjbliverpool said:
Frankly I can't imagine why anyone would choose to believe a religion based creation story when the scientific alternative is so much more elegant and fastinating. And hell, it still leaves the door wide open for the existance of a God!
Click to expand...

That's one problem with religion - whatever science says, religion say "God did that." Starting way back with god making trees and animals and rivers, right up to your modern religious type who's happy to accept evolution but believes the images from COBE to be 'the face of God'

Mind you, you have to explain the asymetry of the big bang somehow ;)
 
I like how a large number of the uninformed mobs that want it shut off are linking their decision based on "We don't have any business with "god particles", but H Boson wouldn't be our undoing to begin with. The energy needed for a H. Boson is attainable by other colliders, but we don't have enough "data capture" hardware to watch the resulting proton hulk-smash ;) to definitively detect it.

If we want to talk universe-ending, we should be talking about the 9 TeV experiment planned to detect supersymmetry particles if they don't find them at lower power. That's where they turn the volume knob all the way to 11 and see who's listening... And if you want to be scared about quantum singularities, then somewhere around Q4 2010 is where you should be focusing your angst.
 
You know I could understand some of the hoopla surrounding the LHC eg biggest collider in the world, biggest teams, most money spent, decades of waiting blah blah balh, but what I want to know is WTF is the PURPOSE of this? What do we hope to get out of it? I don't get it. As far as I could tell the Scientific Revolution era is long gone. We seem to be spending buttloads of money on these kinds of experiments yet what we get back can't really be put to practical applications.

Back in the day you only needed one scientist like Nikola Tesla with a brilliant mind who did experiments in his backyard without having to spend buttloads of money. He made huge discoveries which changed the world forever and he made many of them too. Nowadays we spend billions with teams numbering in the thousands and decades of research only to come out with...."Oh we've proven that this does this and it exist"....ok....so? Whoopi f*kin doo...wake me up when someone discovers time travel ok?:rolleyes:
 
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