back to article Large Hadron Collider gives young ALICE a black-hole ray gun

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is ready to provide more scientific breakthroughs to the world after almost two years of slumber and months of recommissioning. Particle-physics boffins tell us the new LHC experiments are "ready to take data at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV (trillion electron volts), almost double the …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If these guys aren't scared then all I can say is they do NOT watch/read enough Sci-fi.

    1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
      Trollface

      I'll just leave this here.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Or history.

    3. DropBear
      Joke

      Oh, they should be fine as long as they don't run Project 23...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      For those of a paranoid persuasion, comfort can be found here:

      Tin Foil Comfort

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Sense of humour?

    First thing that sprung to mind? Alice from Resident Evil, an experiment to create a super bio-weapon ...or am I obsessing to much over Milla?

    1. Fungus Bob

      Re: am I obsessing to much over Milla?

      not possible

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: am I obsessing to much over Milla?

        I agree. She is one beautiful woman.

  3. AbelSoul
    Trollface

    Alice, Alice?

    Who the f*ck is ALICE?

    A Large Ion Collider Experiment, you say?

    What's that now?

    ALICE is a larger lardy too?

    Larger *and* lardy?

    Oh, well. I'm glad that's finally settled.

    Chubby Brown will be pleased.

    1. Mark 85
      Coat

      Re: Alice, Alice?

      You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.

      Big black holes, a new universe...

      You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.

      Excepting Alice.

      Apologies to Arlo.

      1. Naughtyhorse

        Re: Alice, Alice?

        wheres the other 27 minutes worth of text???

        :-)

        1. Fungus Bob

          Re: Alice, Alice?

          He's lazy. 27 more minutes of text would require an even bigger apology to Arlo...

  4. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Famous Last Words

    Hey, I found this tiny screw on the floor. Still, probably not important.

    1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Famous Last Words

      There are always a few parts left over.

      1. Kubla Cant

        Re: Famous Last Words

        There are always a few parts left over.

        Especially if you buy your LHCs from Ikea.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Famous Last Words

      "Who put the goat in there?!"

  5. Little Mouse

    "The LHC is absolutely safe," said Hawking

    Arthur: "Is it safe?"

    Ford: "Oh Yes! It's perfectly safe - it's just us who are in trouble"

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: "The LHC is absolutely safe," said Hawking

      Cue ominous music: "Probably not a problem"

      "Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth's atmosphere and nothing terrible happens."

      More on this: The Particle That Broke a Cosmic Speed Limit: Physicists are beginning to unravel the mysteries of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, particles accelerated by the most powerful forces in the universe.

      One can apparently have fun with Smartphones used as cosmic ray detectors: crayfis.io

      1. ian 22

        Re: "The LHC is absolutely safe," said Hawking

        "... and nothing terrible happens."

        Yet.

    2. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      Re: "The LHC is absolutely safe," said Hawking

      "Is it safe?"

      I always prefer Laurence Olivier's delivery.

  6. GSG
    Alien

    Tin foil hat alert

    I'd disregard anything the Professor Hawkins says...

    Whilst it looks to the untrained eye that he's making brilliant physics contributions to the world, in reality, the WiFi was compromised years ago and everything he says and does is controlled by eight legged silver skinned aliens from beyond the moons of Saturn.

    And I, for one, welcome our space arachnoid overlords.

    (in other news, can't wait to see what science comes out of LHC 2.0...)

    1. Stumpy

      Re: Tin foil hat alert

      You're absolutely right. I'd ignore what Proffessor Hawkins says too.

      Now, if Professor Hawking were to say it was safe though, I'd go ahead and believe him.

      (damn, where's that pedant icon when you need it)?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. GSG

        Re: Tin foil hat alert

        Hang on, Professor Hawking is controlled by aliens???

        I meant Justin Hawkins from the Darkness... It's worse than I first thought!!!

        (Oh, and damn you autocorrect. Shakes angry fist)

    2. Olius

      Re: Tin foil hat alert

      "I'd disregard anything the Professor Hawkins says..."

      Same here. Great skater, though.

  7. Seanmon

    Bollocks.

    The thing that happens immediately after the Big Bang is the Maoam advert.

    1. Graham Marsden
      Facepalm

      Re: Bollocks.

      Yeah, but they're trying to re-create it, rather than just fast-forward through it...

  8. Alan Watson
    FAIL

    Not actually new, you know

    You do realise that the ALICE experiment was also there throughout Run 1?

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Not actually new, you know

      At 10,000tons we are pretty sure of its momentum (bugger all) so we aren't entirely sure it was THERE

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not actually new, you know

        "At 10,000tons we are pretty sure of its momentum"

        Ah, you're making the classical mistake of treating the Earth as being a fixed frame of reference. But relativity implies that there is no such fixed frame, so the momentum of ALICE depends on the observer. If the observer is on one of the hadrons going round the ring, the momentum of ALICE is pretty fricking huge, and so when the hadron collides with another hadron, it's pretty certain where ALICE is at the time.

        If I'm walking at 1M/s relative to ALICE, and regard myself as being in a reference frame, then the de Broglie wavelength I perceive for ALICE is about 6.6 * 10-27M. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how big its wavelength appears to be if I'm standing still but we have to allow for saccadic eye movements.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Not actually new, you know

          If I'm standing next to ALICE thinking - "bloody hell thats a lot of detector", then I'm sure that neither of us is moving very much - so I'm mostly uncertain about where it is.

          Although I only became an astrophysicist because i'm too short to be a high-energy physicist.

          It's well known that the only purpose of HEP researchers is to stand in front of detectors in pictures to give them scale. As a result all HEP students are selected to be exactly 2.0m tall

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Not actually new, you know

            My point was that the Planck constant is very small and ALICE is quite large, so even a tiny amount of relative motion means only a tiny amount of position uncertainty.

          2. KitD

            Re: Not actually new, you know

            @YAAC Surely they should all be banana-sized?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quark-gluon plasma

    In effect, the entire universe at this point was a single hadron. We are fortunate that it wasn't part of an experiment in a much, much bigger LHC.

    Or perhaps it was, and the entire observable universe is simply the decomposition fragments. We are just in a much bigger version of ALICE. Not turtles all the way down, LHCs and ALICES all the way up.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Quark-gluon plasma

      We just don't know.

      1. hplasm
        Happy

        Re: Quark-gluon plasma

        @DAM

        What are birds?

    2. toxicdragon

      Re: Quark-gluon plasma

      @Arnaut

      Thats my favorite theory, some kind of dimensional reproduction.

    3. PNGuinn
      Mushroom

      Re: Quark-gluon plasma Arnaut

      Beware of experiments entitled "Frankie" or "Benjy".

      El reg - we need an icon for a Vogon Constructor fleet....

    4. Mark 85
      Pint

      @Arnaut -- Re: Quark-gluon plasma

      Boggles the mind, doesn't it? And there's the possibility that ALICE running us is being run by a bigger ALICE. I think it's time for a beer and quiet contemplation.

  10. Joe Harrison

    Live coverage

    "Bored Scientists Now Just Sticking Random Things Into Large Hadron Collider"

    http://www.theonion.com/video/bored-scientists-now-just-sticking-random-things-i-36415

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Was it safe to set sail into unknown oceans? Safe to inject yourself with the first polio vaccine? Was it safe to use a screwdriver to keep two half spheres of beryllium from enclosing a close to critical sphere of plutonium?

    Pushing into the unknown will always be dangerous, after all we do not know what is there, but it is equally dangerous, if not more so to not push into the unknown.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Was it safe to use a screwdriver to keep two half spheres of beryllium from enclosing a close to critical sphere of plutonium?"

      Not only is the answer "No", but with the resources available to the Manhattan Project it was criminal negligence. Physicists are not an easily renewable resource; can anyone seriously suggest that a technician couldn't have been found to build a safe test rig?

      I bet when Columbus set off to cross the ocean, if someone had said "that's a nasty looking crack in the mainmast" he wouldn't have said "oh forget it, I doubt there are any big storms out there."

  12. artificial bitterness

    yes, it is safe.

    look, if it starts to go tiny bit wrong, we'll just drop in a baguette and make it stop. Ok?

  13. Mephistro
    Coat

    It's an interesting article

    But I can't concentrate due to a small buzzing fly. It's very small. Mmmhh.. and round! And it has no wings!!

    What the ... zzzzztttttt...[lost carrier]

  14. Riku

    That's not ALICE

    The article's headline image is of the ATLAS experiment's detector. If you do a Google image search for "CERN ALICE", it is generally recognisable as "the big red octagon". (ALICE is a customer of ours, nice folks too).

  15. Munchausen's proxy
    Pint

    I never get tired of their webcams

    http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

  16. JCitizen
    Black Helicopters

    Hawking is right but..

    The type of chaos introduced by the Large Hadron Collider may be different from that of nature.

    "The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and is about to come up out of the abyss, and to go into perdition. And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, they whose name hath not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast, how that he was, and is not, and shall come." - Revelation 17:8

    Could we be initiating a time traveling chaos to the earth? Just wondering! God, who is the King of chaos, is not worried, he warned us of it after all!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hawking is right but..

      God, who is the King of chaos, is not worried, he warned us of it after all!

      OK, I was raised Christian, but even if you take it on faith that Jesus was the son of god, sent to earth to forgive us our sins, and even if you accept that the gospels written by his disciples are an accurate chronicle of his life and sayings, why on earth should we pay any credence to what some nut job in Anatolia wrote at least 50 years later, claiming to be divine revelations that he received in visions?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    If they can aim it...

    ...then I have a target for them.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    13 TeV (trillion electron volts)

    Yes, but will it run Crysis?

    1. Naughtyhorse

      Yes, but will it run Crysis?

      only if you turn off anisotropic fog

  19. JDX Gold badge

    Season 2...

    "Previously on LHC..."

  20. Schlimnitz

    That video is highly suspect.

    It makes me feel like understand what they're doing.

    Which is totally impossible.

  21. launcap Silver badge

    astonishingly hot, dense soup?

    Careful, you'll be getting sued by politicians for stealing their tagline..

    (Would politicians make good LHC targets? Needs something incredibly dense that won't be missed if destroyed..)

    1. Alistair
      Windows

      Re: astonishingly hot, dense soup?

      I suggest that we make the politicians into a dense soup, then use the LHC to make it astonishingly hot.

      But then I'm a cynical bastard these days.

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