The Hadron Collider: What's it all about, then?

@I'm confused

*rolls eyes*

Read something on special relativity. Please.

Mine's the one with a crib sheet on the garage paradox in the pocket.

Re: a hyperdrive propulsion capable of making the trip to Mars in 5 hours

I think a hyperdrive is whatever you want it to be. It's fictional, a bit like Mike Sala

The Huggs Bossom..

How on earth will Doc Emmett Brown fit this contraption into the DeLorean time machine? In essence it is an oversized Flux Capacitor used to move matter around at light speed and cause two particles (Marty McFly & Biff) to collide!

@Graham Orr

"PS do the Taliban know and are there enough virgins for all of them turning up at the same time?"

Don't worry, there's plenty of Star Trek fans to go around...

With apologies to Family Guy

Would it not be better........

..... to have some super-rich, uber geek (with initials BG ?) use all his hard-earned cash to develop our very own Deep Thought (that's the Douglas Addams one, not the sad IBM effort), and then Deep Thought can produce all the answers without us mere mortals putting our whole existence on the line by (possibly) generating black holes in an atom-smasher ?

re: element 115, anybody ???

You used the wrong icon.

Either that or you'll have to explain why element 115 is the result of two stars near each other.

@Darren B

You mean a colander? A large hadron colander would have to have very small holes...

taking the piss

is all very well, but you can't knock the scale and complexity of this experiment. also, if the higgs is not found now, it never will be no matter how large an accelerator is built...

Stupid idea

I hope the explosion blows up the detector

Hog's Bison: The Guardian explains it all quite well...

"27km large haddock collider smashes barnacles together at 47 times the speed of matter, recreating conditions last seen shortly after Big Ben. Heat and pressure combine to create Cod particle, also known as Hog’s bison."

Full version here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2008/09/10/cern_G2_cover.pdf

RE: A Hardon Colider!?

It's only gay if the balls touch.

Cups of tea

A good source of Brownian motion for your warp drive there mate

New physics - poor SF writers...

Just think of all the SF writers out there waiting to revise their tech.. :)

Neat gizmo though..

Faster than light

Sorry to nit pick but E=mc^2 doesn't say "nothing can travel faster than the speed of light".

What it says is for a body of mass to accelerate to the speed of light either requires an infinite amount of energy in a finite amount of time, or a finite amount of energy in an infinite amount of time. As time (at the moment) is purely a relativistic concept this isn't precluded.

Additionally, there is nothing that prevents a body of mass ALWAYS having traveled at superluminal speeds.

Finally the groups velocity of light waves have already experimentally been made to travel faster than light.

Personally, I hope they don't find the Higgs, it's a horribly inelegant theory and it will be far more exciting if they don't.

@DarrenB

A Large Hardon Colander eh.... brings to mind some kind of glory hole experiment gone awry :-/

Mines the grubby brown mac with the copy of perv monthly in it.

I helped build some of the earlier CERN high energy magic machines..

It was nice to hear the SPS getting a mention on radio4 this am, nobody reminded us how the LEP - large electron positron 27km biggest experiment since...yes, you've heard it, anyway how LEP couldn't circulate a beam at first try as some joker had stuffed an empty beer bottle up the vacuum tube! I presume LHC had an obstacle patrol!

I once dumped n x 10^9 antiprotons at 3.5GeV/c into the wrong place, wasn't no black holes that I noticed, but it did snow a lot that year!

I never thought I’d see a resonance cascade, let alone cause one!

Good article, I liked it. Also, the links to Field Propulsion were nice, though I had to look up “circumferential”. I must say, as a layman, having three independent experiments that all measure an artificial gravity field orders of magnitude greater than can be predicted by general relativity is quite exiting. I hope they continue to progress.

As for the LHC, well some peoples reactions over at lhcconcerns just makes me think that science is not being taught very well in our schools. Hell, they scare me more than the totally improbable chance that LHC will produce a stable black hole or spark another big bang. I mean, people going “There are some things that must remain a mystery” is just freaky, if everyone had that attitude, then we’d still be living in caves.

History is littered with mouth breathers like them. The first passenger trains got created and you had people who insisted that going over 30mph would asphyxiate the passengers. Or how about people who thought that the detonation of a nuclear bomb above ground would cause the atmosphere to ignite, incinerating all life on the planet?

We have observed “jets” being emitted from the poles of other galaxies. Currently, we think that these are partials being ejected by the magnetic field of a super massive black hole that’s in a feeding stage. We think these particles are travelling at near the speed of light. So how come, when they hit something they don’t seem to produce a black hole or a new big bang? After all, they have far more energy than can be produced by LHC.

All this scaremongering is about a valid as people getting scared of Dihydrogen monoxide.

Hope the LHC team find some interesting stuff though. It would be a shame if all that money was spent and nothing new was found. Mind you, given the nature of an experiment failure to find something is still a result.

Bye!

re: Bryce Prewitt

I bet the gman works at CERN >.<

Lets see.....crowbar...check, pistol...check

Mine's the orange and black HEV suit

If your wondering why SETI can't find extraterrestrial life

Maybe they should try boosting their reception on signals in the digital television spectrum to find the sad final moments of our noble alien neighbors at the height of their hubris? I can see it now:

"This is Xeenathean News Network science correspondent Browarjemenq Nprinwed coming to you live from the opening ceremony of the brand-new Beam Fusion Directorate. The atmosphere here in the BFD control room is one of pure excitement as Supreme Overlord Lweyintokl is set to press the shiny red button that will start the first full power experiment and usher in a new age of understanding of our universe. The Supreme Overlord is stepping up to the control panel and he's reaching for the button! You can hear the beam generat...."

PLEASE STAND BY. WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Gordon Freeman

You jest.

http://www.shacknews.com/screenshots.x?gallery=10698&game_id=

No news good news?

I got excited for a while, but what a let down!

The www.cern.ch was unresponsive for most of the day. And now when I finally got through today, there's no mention of anything happening since last Friday:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/List.html

Maybe they blew up afterall.

@ Anon John

Five hours to Mars, and you have to spend one and a half times that long clearing Customs, getting your insides sterilized (we can't pollute another planet with our germs), and getting x-rayed for terrorist paraphernalia. Oh, and then there are the lines.. So big deal!

Paris, because she'll be only one of the few who can afford the trip!

Hmm

@beast666

Quote: "You are so wrong on so many levels... The Higgs mechanism may seem convoluted"

So I find the theory cludgy and inelegant. Hmm so I'm intrigued - that makes me wrong on so many levels how?

@Dave Morris

Quote: "Unless I missed some recent newsbreaking update from our dearly departed Einstein, he said nothing about E=mc^2 having anything to do with how fast something can move."

Err... yes actually he did.

If a force is applied to an object in the direction of motion, the object gains momentum. It also gains energy because the force is doing work.

The formula you are probably looking for is: E^2=( mc^2 )^2 +( pc )^2

BTW. Relativistc Mass is generally frowned on by serious scientists.

@Andrew

Nothing with mass can go the speed of light, and massless particles can not (supposedly) go any faster. However, as a particle with mass approaches the speed of light, its mass increases, to infinity the closer it gets to C. This is what prevents it from achieving light speed. As the mass increases, so does the particle's kinetic energy, which is what ultimately makes the collision more powerful (like two semis vs. two compact cars), and what yields the bizarre collision products that are hoped for. As a side note, since photons travel the speed of light, due to time dilation, photons do not age (travel forward through time), a concept that has always fascinated me.

Re. a large hardon collider: That's one event I really hope I don't get to see, nor its collision products. It's bad enough with one when you slip out.

title needed? but i dont want one!

lol http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

Swallow that coffee before reading this.

Q: So what instrument are the boffins going to use to view the Higgs boson at the LHC?

A: A COLLIDERscope!! (Get it! kaleidoscope, colliderscope? If I have to explain it it just spoils it)

Whatever...

I just hope the LHC's powerful field doesn't align the magnetic field underneath of it, causing a magnetic pole shift. Then that whole area of Europe would have virtually no shielding from the Sun's radiation, and would fry. Oops.

Last night's One Show on BBC

It was hilarious! Up to €6.4 billion and 20 years for a small flash on a screen. Quality. Didn't it make all you scientist dicks (no pun intended) look stupid with you hardon machine.

PS - Nice picture on Page 1 el Reg - it's of a tunnel but where is the hardon machine?

Paris - she would spot a missing hardon machine

@Neil

You just proved yourself wrong.

Your E=mc2 is the RESULT of relativistic momentum. E=mc2 doesn't have anything to do with explaining why things can't go at the speed of light, and why? There's NOTHING about the speed of the particle in that equation. There IS in the other one you produced.

Parallel Particle Streams XXXXSTreaming ..... String Entangled for Singularity Quests in AIMissions*

"Did you know that the chamber containing the ATLAS detector is so massive (35m high) that it actually has buoyancy in the Earth's crust?! It rises at a rate of 0.02mm per year, and so the floor had to be set to a 5m thickness to prevent warping.

I'm a bit of an LHC geek, despite having only a basic grasp of the physics..." ... By Alastair Smith Posted Tuesday 9th September 2008 22:32 GMT

Now that is Proper Planning and Preparation Perfectly Preventing Piss Poor Performance. By the WAI, you do Realise that CERN is Radiating Intellectual Property Energy ...... and AI 4FlowurPower2Source.... ReGenerative Enriching Source.

Which would be ....... well, Priceless Really but Virtually just Beautifully XXXXOrbitantly Expensive. A Paper Cost to Some Ne'er do wells playing Zero Sum Games for Privy Gains ... but a Bonus to Everybody Else.

"I knew it ... http://largehardoncollider.com/

(yes, the spelling *is* correct)" .... By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 10th September 2008 07:17 GMT

I Love the Unknown Particle/Center of the Universe Theme .... Certainly a Rich Vein for Field Testing/Master Piloting/Embracing/Surrendering to, too.

Oh dear, that almost sounds like CERN have a Frankenstein Control of a Creature/ Atlantic Bairn /Atlas Lass.

And a Right Amazon Leader she's Be ...... Party to the Erotic Left of Nerve CERNtre Control....... for the Taste of Native Nicaraguan Riches too.

* Or AI Shared NEUKlearer Missives Registered and Floated into Space. Catch AIdDream and Build with ITs Freely Available GUI ...... the Web and ITs InterNetworking Functions/Supply Services.

Big Business could surely do with the Help to Spend all those written off dollars clogging up some dodgy dealer accounts with neither the wit nor the tit to spend it on.

Poor Currency/Energy/Money Management definitely..

Hmmm

2 news items recently:

-2 bottles of beer were found jammed in the LHC causing expensive delays.

-a large chunk of euro-grant money was transfered from a cern bank account as "IT consultancy costs/other" to a company called British Operational Fluidic Hadrons.

Could these 2 stories be in some way related??