Massive Particle Accelerator Revving Up

Lynette1977
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Massive Particle Accelerator Revving Up

I heard this on NPR the other day and thought I'd pass it along...

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9433495

This fall, physicists plan to throw the switch on what is arguably the largest and most complex science experiment ever conducted. An underground ring of superconducting magnets, reaching from Switzerland into France, will smash together subatomic particles at incredible force.

Physicists say they're not sure what will emerge from those collisions. They're hunting a mysterious, hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. It is also possible they will make miniature black holes, or discover new dimensions of space-time...READ THE REST HERE

 

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Vastet
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Due to the nature of the

Due to the nature of the news being offered, I should submit a link to a report I posted the other day.

Big bang experiment goes bang

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Unfortunately there was an

Unfortunately there was an article last week they are having problems with some of the magnet braces and it may set back the online date for the accelerator.


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Vastet wrote: Due to the

Vastet wrote:
Due to the nature of the news being offered, I should submit a link to a report I posted the other day. Big bang experiment goes bang

Thanks Vastet, this is the article I was referring to. 


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No problem. I do like that

No problem.

I do like that it's only setting things back a few months. You'd think a 20 ton magnet being lifted off it's mountings could set it back years.

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The CERN site explains it

The CERN site explains it very well.

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html 

You can even subscribe to the newsletter. 

http://cnl.web.cern.ch/cnl/

Fermilab has a newsletter as well:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/subscription.html

They're in charge of the quadrupole magnets in the LHC.

 

Did the Egyptians stop after the first pyramid stone fell?

What CERN is doing now will change the way our children (or nieces and nephews) live in the future.

The details of the US's involvement with CERN go way back. We are nothing more than a nation of 'takers' offering little in return going as far back as the fall of the wall in Berlin to our present administration's failure to follow through with promises made 10 years ago and some promises 15 years ago long before I even knew what a muon or even a proton-proton collision was.

We lie about our GDP to them. We lie about our population to them. We use every breakthrough that the European coucil releases and they ask only for our participation in future endeavors. We slyly smile and slink away to count how much money we can fleece from our own people to live in this postmodernist hell of an existence. Meanwhile, the really good people must be drug through the muck like some popstar going in to rehab because one little thing didn't go as expected.

Anyway, there are the sites that I continue to read.

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 This experiment is cool.

 This experiment is cool. I always like hearing new stuff from the strange world of subatomic physics. I really want to know if they find the Higgs Boson particle (the God particle), or if they can detect WIMPs (crappy name for Dark Matter, I know, it's Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). It almost makes me regret turning down studying atoms to study enzymes and cells, but only almost.

I was always fascinated by quantum physics and theoretical particle physics. I was especially interested in hyperspace and string theory, and always contemplated multiverse theory (which, remarkably, is nearing almost complete concensus among theoretical and quantum physicists). I was especially interested in the notion that if universes are always spawning, for eternity, then that would mean that life is infinite and eternal, and by extension intelligent life is eternal and infinite, which in theory means that concious observers are immortal.  Seeing as our universe will one day die a very slow Heat Death, it would be fascinating (and obviously philosopically pleasing) if we could flee to another one as suggested by Michio Kaku.

 

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

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Lynette1977

Lynette1977 wrote:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9433495

This fall, physicists plan to throw the switch on what is arguably the largest and most complex science experiment ever conducted. An underground ring of superconducting magnets, reaching from Switzerland into France, will smash together subatomic particles at incredible force.

Physicists say they're not sure what will emerge from those collisions. They're hunting a mysterious, hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. It is also possible they will make miniature black holes, or discover new dimensions of space-time...READ THE REST HERE

Pfft, we all know what's going to happen.  Not any of that Higgs boson whatchamacallits.  Somehow a kid, a spider, bat, rat and kryptonite crystal will find their way in to the tunnel at just the right time and all merge to become Spibatninjaturtleuper Man! 

Either that or god will mistake the unplanned calamity for his alarm clock, wake up, swat at the world and wipe us all out before he even manages to open his eyes and realise he has a morning glory. 

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