back to article LHC smashes Tevatron record: Humanity enters the unknown

In the early hours this morning, boffins at the controls of the Large Hadron Collider brought the colossal particle-punisher up to beam energies of 1.18 tera-electron-volts (TeV), breaking the world atomsmasher record of 0.98 TeV held by the US Tevatron. The LHC is now officially the most powerful matter-rending machine in …

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  1. Winkypop Silver badge
    Boffin

    Three cheers for applied Boffinry

    Hooray!

    Hooray!

    Hooray!

    Isn't science amazing?

  2. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    "Lost due to tune drifting"

    Obvously something unexpected at work there causing it to be terribly out of tune.

    As an unknown is often referred to as the "X-factor" this makes a lot of sense.

  3. Paul_Murphy

    Can't wait.

    On holiday over christmas, so plenty of time to prepare for invading monsters and the like.

    Be a bit of a bummer if micro black holes start rampaging around the planet though.

    I was going to use the PH thumb and mention something about black holes, but thought better of it.

    ttfn

  4. lewton
    Grenade

    Keep banging the rocks together

    Well, it's the same principle

  5. Rocket
    Stop

    There's something strange happening

    Is this why I couldn't sleep last night?

    Although I wasn't aware of the terror being induced in the matter being spin-dizzied in the caves of France, my sleep was broken by strange dreams of swatted flies, traffic accidents and *ahem* fluid leaks.

    Investigations must be carried out of the possible implications on our collective psyche!

    1. Fred 24

      Sleepless nights

      I've noticed, in que's at shops, in the pub, and at work that it seems recently a LOT of people are talking about having difficulty sleeping. I am curious as to what measures are taken to contain the stray R.F., magnetism that this beast is generating...after all the brain is an electrical organ, blah, blah blah.

  6. AreBelongToUs
    Boffin

    Anomalous Materials

    Get away from there, Freeman! I'm expecting an important message!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Long and shiny, with a knob on the end

    Am I the only one who wants the power levels of the LHC to be controlled by a huge lever on the wall? Preferably with a couple of flashing orange lights that activate when the lever moves into the red zone.

    1. ravenviz Silver badge
      Joke

      Oh no, not *that* sort of Hard Wrong Glider

      A la Gilbert Ratchet it would have a Too Energetic setting innappropriately activated by a falling bread roll

  8. Rob
    Go

    In time for xmas

    Great, somewhere exotic to shop for xmas presents if they can get the portal open in time.

  9. Jimmy Floyd
    Joke

    Ice? Very 20th century.

    "...I’m keeping my champagne on ice...."

    Liquid helium, shurely?

  10. David Adams
    Paris Hilton

    In the Words of Paris Hilton...

    ... "Don't be afraid to turn it up"

  11. Eddie Edwards
    Joke

    Beware

    I know someone who works at the LHC, and apparently the thing almost blew up again.

    This was caused entirely by the fact that when the operator wanted to click on "SHUTDOWN NOW" some fucking auto-opening Shell advertisement got in his way.

    Apparently CERN is going to rethink the ad-sponsored "free superconducting magnets" programme for LHC #2.

  12. ShaggyDoggy

    Huh ?

    More weather "anomalies" forecast then .... just ask the residents of Cockermouth what was happening at CERN at the precise time 12 inches of rain landed on them ... remember in science there's no such thing as a coincidence

  13. luis sancho

    A DAMOCLES MACHINE THAT IS HALTING THE ADVANCE OF TRUE SCIENCE

    30th of November is a key date in the history of mankind, which for the first time in our short self-destructive existence has managed to built a Damocles sword that menaces its very own survival, by entering in the region of Energies in which our electro-weak matter dies, ‘breaking its symmetry’, transformed in quark, dark matter. Beyond 1 teravolts our matter dies and we enter in a extremely dangerous unknown region in which many theoretical and experimentally proved particles can provoke a ‘big-bang’ Nova of the Earth. Thus we shall walk under the Damocles Machine every day till in 2012 it reaches its maximal power.

    CERN misinforms mankind.

    The Large Hadron Collider is a quark factory that will deconfine millions of quarks, the strongest, most attractive particles of the Universe. They carry the Atom’s mass, caged inside their nuclei. 99% of LHC’s production will consist on superfluid Quark condensates, a new state of matter, defined by Einstein, in which Quarks fusion together, creating hyper-dense, attractive tornado-like vortices with properties similar to black holes. Astro-physicists fear that if enough quarks are pegged together in one of those condensates, they can trigger a mass-reaction that would attract all the other quarks of the Earth, transforming our planet into a dense pulsar or black hole. Because in Nature all what is possible happens (Gell Mann’s Totalitarian principle), Quark stars should happen at LHC, making prohibitive for Public Policy the risks for Earth of a quark factory in this planet.

    This is a clear case of industrial corruption. But the Company voices out 'ad hominem' campaigns against those who denounced the crime, voices out false statements (CERN portrays the quark factory as a cosmic ray factory, when we never found quarks in cosmic rays), and makes marketing campaigns on fringe theories pumped up as the ‘meaning of it all’ (the god' s particle, which Nambu, last year nobel prize proved to be self-similar to the already discovered top quark, hence non-existent, as the Universe is NOT redundant; the big-bang hype, a theory today cosmologists are discharging for the experimentally proved by the Hubble1 ‘fractal Universe’, of infinite hierarchical scales).

    Einstein’s relativity not quantum theorists have properly defined Mass as a whirl of space-time, a ‘frequency’ of rotation that attarcts more like a huricane, when it turns faster as Nobel Prize Wilczek and this author have stated ad nauseam2. Just substitute in E=Mc2 and ExT=K (einstein’s 2 formulas for energy) and you get M=k/T=k v (frequency) – Mass is therefore the frequency of a cyclical vortex, a clock of time that carries the information of the Universe. Einstein defined mass, according to the Principle of Equivalence as a cyclical, accelerated vortex of spacetime, whose mechanism of attraction is obvious: the faster the vortex rotates the more it attracts. On the other side the absurd Higgs Mechanism propose an invisible ‘particle’ is ‘foreseen’ by other particles who ‘come to meet Higgs’ as if ‘it were a celebrity’ (sic), attracting them. This is nonsense, and so Nobel prize Weinberg calls Higgs the ‘toilet particle’, to be flushed down into one of Einstein’s spacetime vortex as the Earth might be next year.

    This means there is no Higgs or Hawking’s radiation. As 2 recent experiments have confirmed; since the Fermi satellite sent to find evaporation of black holes in the galactic halo found none, and an experiment made with ‘dumb holes’ (black holes of sound) found none. And so a black hole will kill us.

    CERN’s quantum entropy physicists deny Einstein’s work, despite being the foundation of modern cosmology because in Einstein’s models upgraded today by fractal Relativity the risks of extinction are close to 100%3. Many lives are at risk, real lives of real people, as never before.

    Today mankind has no defense because the judiciary, politicians and the press who should check and denounce the excesses of companies and governments are not doing their job of warning the population. Time is running out for politicians to take seriously the biggest danger for Global Safety of the year 2010. This machine-weapon MUST be halted till the theoretical dispute between quantum theorists and relativity theorists is solved, as all seems to indicate in favor of Einstein; the true master of physics, NOT a machine but a HUMAN MIND showed us. Recently ‘quantum physicists’ proved with nonsense maths that the future was interfering with LHC. It is ‘the future of science’ what is warning mankind against an obsolete machine that menaces the future of all of us.

    1 www.newscientist.com/article/dn14200

    http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings51st/article/view/651

    2 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/253/

    http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings50th/article/view/27/201

    3 At www.lhcdefence.org you can see a documentary with the real nature of CERN.

    1. Gordon is not a Moron

      so luis..

      what did you leave at home this time, those little pills the doctor keeps giving you or the tinfoil hat?

    2. tim 52
      Badgers

      re. A DAMOCLES MACHINE ....

      Did anyone bother reading all that?! Someone's clearly got a pickle up his arse.

    3. David Adams
      Badgers

      Yeah, But

      It'd be cool though!!

    4. Rob
      Go

      For a moment...

      .... I was getting worried we wouldn't have any comments from the nutjobs out on the internet about our impending doom.... but it appears full service has now resumed.

    5. Jonathan 10
      WTF?

      Erm come again?

      Are you saying the machine is going to destroy the world?

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Post your own message

      Well, the upside is, it would sort out that nasty mess we're having with the economy these days.

    7. Craig (well, I was until The Reg changed it to Craig 16)

      Tin foil hat time

      It's clearly all a plot by that Mandelson bloke who will unmask himself as an interdimensional alien set on removing rogue universes from the multiverse. I, for one, hope that Mandelson will reconsider and become our universal overlord protecting us against other such aliens.

    8. ravenviz Silver badge
      FAIL

      toilet particle

      I wash my hands of all of this

    9. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

      Amazing

      So, the governments of several countries invest countless billions of EUR just to test your theory without you having to contribute a penny - what's there to complain about, Mr Sancho?

    10. Winkypop Silver badge
      Stop

      Luis, mate.

      Take a breath, settle down. Relax.

      Remember: May the quark be with you*

      * regardless of the dimension you find yourself in.

    11. Anonymous Coward
      Flame

      idiot

      Ludite.

      Fool.

      twit.

      waste of air.

    12. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      interesting

      There are lots of people here who are quick to jump Luis' post, I wonder how many of them are particle physicists? I'm not, so his post sounds like gibberish to me, but then so do the press releases from CERN. I think that the most interesting thing here is how many people, apparently as ignorant as me, are more than happy to heap abuse on a chap simply because he is not officially sanctioned, a Nurenberg herd instinct if ever there was one.

      I would be most interested to read a response from a real particle physicist who addresses what he actually says. Isn't that what science is supposed to be like?

  14. David 45

    Startrek stuff

    Ye cannae change the laws of physics, cap'n.

  15. beast666
    FAIL

    Go take the meds...

    Go take a pill, what the f*** was that all about?!? Jesus, I won't even try to argue with you.... Merry Christmas

  16. Gordon 10
    Coffee/keyboard

    **cough** Luis Nutjob **cough**

    that is all.

  17. Secretgeek

    @luis sancho

    Sorry but you lost me at "...halting the advance of true science."

    Take off your tinfoil hat, try rewriting your post and I'll give it another go as it sounds like you might possibly have something interesting to say.

  18. HoRnO
    FAIL

    luis sancho

    Seriously dude, what did you do, sign up to any story about the LHC and post the same crap over and over?

    I have no problem with my tax money going to futher the world of science but I draw the line at giving dribbling retards access to the internet from whatever rubber roomed hospital you're clearly in!

  19. breakfast Silver badge
    Go

    You Maniacs! You blew it up!

    Well there it is. Here's hoping in their hunger for high-speed particles crashing into each other they have not delved too greedily and too deep...

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    Unlike...

    ...the "Dimensional Rending" alarmists, I choose to see the anomalous deviations in reality as consistent with the natural cycles of the universe as played out over cosmic timescales rather than the result of 50 brief years of human activity in the sphere of atomic annihilation.

    Anthropogenic Space-Time Continuum Collapse is a sop to the blame-humanity-first'ers served up by the leftwing press toiling in the deception-mills of their socialist realism inspired media-collectives!

    Rather than chicken-little ourselves back into a pre-atomic torpor, we must accept and embrace the natural rhythms of our universe and those adjacent. We must realise our capacity to adapt and evolve to meet the challenges of an increasingly divergent unreality.

    Ephemeral black holes spun out of raw matter tortured by cataclysmic energies barely within our control are as natural as the sunrise, or the morning breeze, or our anti-matter doppelganger relentlessly hunting us out of pure parallel-universe malevolence...

  21. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Whoopee, I think?

    Amazing! Wonderful! Great! What the hell is going on?

    Sounds like a lot of very sad, privileged geeks, doing a bit of the old geek-type Master Batesing!

    I'm sure this has some practical use to us mere mortals, but I'll wait until I get some benefit before I start cheering.

  22. teacake

    @luis sancho

    "A DAMOCLES MACHINE THAT IS HALTING THE ADVANCE OF TRUE SCIENCE"

    Careful. Some spittle nearly hit me there.

    "Astro-physicists fear that if enough quarks are pegged together in one of those condensates, they can trigger a mass-reaction that would attract all the other quarks of the Earth, transforming our planet into a dense pulsar or black hole."

    Splendid performance. I'm an astro-physicist. I don't fear this. Smash them particles, I say, and let's see what falls out. Last one to get turned into strangelet soup's a ninny!

  23. copsewood
    Joke

    Particle experiment and the Big Bang

    It's an amusing idea that the Big Bang from whence we all came was a particle accellerator experiment that went wrong.

    1. Fred 24

      or...

      ..are you trying to say we ARE god??? maybe now is the time to revise the list for animals for creation?

    2. Kevin Campbell

      Mostly Harmful

      As EVERYONE should darn well know, the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure. We fear the LHC will bring about The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.

  24. arreg
    Alien

    LHC whistle-blower sending a cry for help?

    "In all cases the FMCM dumped the beam before any BLM triggered..."

    No-one seems to have spotted the coded warning about the possibility of Big Lime-green Monsters being "triggered" (i.e. emerging from a newly-opened Portal to the Other Side).

    Looks like a cry for help from one of the LHC staff, who knows what's _really_ going on in there, and has decided to tell the world before it all gets out of hand.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    @luis sancho

    Is there a home for retired doom-mongers? Just wondering what happens to them when the world doesn't end on schedule.

    Or perhaps it does and I'm living in the alternate universe where things worked out ok and some poor version of me is living in the universe where all the power grids failed due to the Y2K Bug and he now has to hunt wooly mamoths for food clothing etc

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    concerned?

    not by quarks or black holes or that, but by the best fix for something going wrong in such a hi-tech place is to turn the computers off. I do that in my decidedly low tech job on the oil rig. surely they must have a better way.

  27. Nazar
    Alert

    20 years into the future...

    Might explain the dream I had last night where I saw myself 20 years in the future....

  28. Gordon is not a Moron
    Alien

    Just a thought

    if the LHC did open up wormholes to other dimensions, that perhaps experieced time in different way than we do.... would it explain amanfromMars?

  29. Ben Rosenthal
    Alien

    THE DAMOCLES MACHINE!!!

    Is that the name of the episode where Tennant gets offed?

  30. frank ly
    Thumb Up

    @Everybody re. luis sancho

    I think he deserves credit for learning how to write using paragraphs. Well done luis :)

  31. Tom Cooke
    Thumb Up

    @rocket

    Kudos for the James Blish "Cities in Flight" reference - mental image of the entire LHC reaching zero gravitational attraction and breaking out of the ground to become the first giant interstellar metal doughnut.

    1. Fred 24

      .so thats...

      ... what the inspiration for the Stargate series was....the writers had got hold of the boffins 'to-build' list!

  32. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
    Joke

    Every time you smash an particle..

    A little bit of mass dies..?

    1. Rob
      Boffin

      Project Management

      Similiar to Project Management, I was always taught that every time you use the word 'on-going' in a Project a little kitten dies.

      As you can imagine our Government IT projects are feline species genocide.

      1. phoenix
        Joke

        Not poor old Shroedinger's cat again

        Is it dead / alive or somewhere between the two?

  33. Captain Thyratron

    @luis sancho

    Relax, guys. He just got really baked and watched some old Dr. Who tapes with Gene Ray.

  34. Sir Runcible Spoon
    Flame

    The End of the World is Nigh

    Good. At least it will be (fairly) quick.

    Rather that than the increase in cataclysmic weather events causing loss of arable land, the exponential rise in population coupled with decreasing resources, increasing nationalism and the inevitable wars that ensue.

    That all sounds a bit drawn out to me, so bring on the Black Hole I say.

  35. ThomasF
    Big Brother

    Luis and The DAMOCLES MACHINE

    Am I the only one that enjoyed this rant. It has it all, enough Techno babble to scare the knickers of a woolly mammoth.

    "Just substitute in E=Mc2 and ExT=K (einstein’s 2 formulas for energy) and you get M=k/T=k v (frequency) – Mass is therefore the frequency of a cyclical vortex, a clock of time that carries the information of the Universe. "

    Enough Semi Religious Babble (if you look hard enough) to straighten up a bent Dublin Priest. "The God particle will find you and it knows what you have done"

    "This machine-weapon MUST be halted till the theoretical dispute between quantum theorists and relativity theorists is solved"

    Quantom Black Hole Cannons at dawn, perhaps, will settle this:=#

    Good on you Luis.

    It was definitely not your usual iFart comment from bored White Van drivers txting in from Peckam Common.

    I for one cannot wait to see what happens next!

  36. Xris M
    Paris Hilton

    How long....

    Even if it does end up destroying the planet aren't the most important questions:

    1. How much warning will I get?

    2. Is this enough time to get round to my girlfiends, with a few minutes to spare?

  37. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Eh?

    "Tested the reaction time of the FMCMs on RD1.LR1, RD1.LR5, RD34.LR3, RQ4.LR7 by switching off the PCs (to avoid a WIC trigger that is even faster than the FMCM in such a case). In all cases the FMCM dumped the beam before any BLM triggered... All MPS tests were successful - excellent performance of the FMCMs. "

    WTF?

  38. ben 29
    Coat

    LHC Jargon

    PCs - Power Coverters

    FMCM - Fast Magnet Current Changing Monitor

    BLM - Beam Loss Monitor

    MPS - Magnet Protection System

    WIC - Warm Magnet Interlock Control

    /mine is the one with a copy of http://lhccwg.web.cern.ch/lhccwg/Bibliography/UsefulAcronyms.htm in the pocket

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    They're waiting for you, Gordon...

    ...in the *test* chamber.

  40. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    The most important question remains unanswered

    Does the power level go up to "11"?

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    nothing to see here

    No, really. You can't see any of it.

    I, for one, welcome our higgs overlords.

  42. Deadlock Victim

    I for one...

    ...welcome the coming of our new Cthonian masters. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

  43. Ian R

    Nah

    R2? Fire up the power converters!

  44. Chris iverson
    Grenade

    Wait, Wait

    We cant open a portal to other dimensions yet. I haven't finished my plasma rifle and BFG yet. All the lost souls that will be flying around are a little more than my .45 can handle.

    Grenade cause thats all I have working

  45. Raving
    Paris Hilton

    968 more 'Collision Days' to go

    That means only 968 more 'Collision Days' remaining until the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

    Paris 'cos she wants a bigger gun.

  46. Rattus Rattus

    So we have a new amanfrommars do we?

    Reading all of Luis' post nearly made my eyes bleed (not to mention my brain), but just one thing that immediately leapt out at me:

    "we never found quarks in cosmic rays"

    Cosmic rays = highly energetic nuclei = protons & neutrons.

    Protons & neutrons - MADE OF SODDING QUARKS!

    So yes, we do find quarks in cosmic rays.

  47. Adrian Esdaile
    Alert

    Invest in tinned food and shotguns

    Personally I have a crowbar with me at all times.

    Outbreak! Outbreak! Outbreak!

  48. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Promises, promises

    "And - just perhaps - the opening of a mysterious portal to another dimension, through which might come 'something', if you play your cards right " she said.

  49. Mike Flugennock
    Coat

    Dimensional portal by Christmas?

    Well, hell; that oughta make things way easier for Santa Claus, then.

    Not only that, but all those parents will finally have a ready answer for when their kids ask how Santa's able to bring toys to children all over the world in one night: "...well, Johnny, Santa uses the interdimensional portal at the LHC, that's how!"

    Uh, yeah; that one there, with the sonic screwdriver in the inside pocket...

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