Has the LHC not destroyed the universe yet?
How disappointing.
Upgrade time already? It would seem so: three years since its last refit, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is taking a two-year break so boffins can embark on another. In 2015, the LHC hit 13 tera-electron volts (TeV), and part of this upgrade cycle will take it to its original design energy of 14 TeV. The scientists will …
There is a possibly that events may be observed-dependent, so it might have happened for some.
Switzerland is part of the Schengen Area, so no passport checks at the border. However its not part of the single market, so they can search your car. Once they find something interesting, then they ask for the passport.
CERN has a special status, they can receive goods both from Switzerland and from the EU without border checks.
Well, here we are, millions of years after our earliest ancestors started banging rocks together and we continue along the very same theme. All right, the rocks are way way smaller, but the principle remains the same. Scale it up and everything in the entire universe works on the same basis at a massive scale; collisions, gravity, energy released, matter transformed etc. etc. I'm not knocking the brilliant science that goes on at places like CERN, just thinking that maybe the term Big Bang really does have a ring of nominative determinism about it all.
"Scale it up and everything in the entire universe works on the same basis at a massive scale;"
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the problem is not the physics of scaling up from sub-atomic particles - the problem is that what happens when you scale down from there is not consistent with what happens when you scale up.
Simple phrase: "The new linear accelerator will accelerate H− ions, which are later stripped to protons..."
If you strip an electron from mono hydrogen you get H- ... all that's left is a proton isn't it?
Or are they talking about doubly ionised di-hydrogen ie an H2 molecule with both electrons removed (H2)2- which are then separated into 2H-?
The regular hydrogen nucleus is just one positively-charged proton.
The innermost electron orbital around it, known as the S, has room for two negatively-charged electrons.
H+ has no electrons and is just a proton.
H has one electron and a neutral electric charge.
H− has two electrons, and is stable because they fill the S orbital so nicely.
@Tomato42 -- On the other hand, we are very slow to adopt new software because of the difficulties in verifying it against the older. Current CERN recommended OS is CentOS 7, but our software is only certified for SLC (Scientific Linux CERN) 6, so sites which have adopted C7 have to run analysis/Monte Carlo software in SLC6 containers. ISTR there was a glitch in this when it was first tried.
From
https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/04/01/a-modest-proposal-for-new-fundamental-constants/
Ken Bloom:
All that being said, an inverse picobarn is very hard for most people to visualize. We can imagine what an area — the side of a barn — looks like, but we’re not used to picturing inverse areas. Fortunately, I have a solution to this problem. There is in fact a unit in common usage that is also an inverse area. This is the standard unit of fuel efficiency, the mile per gallon. With a length in the numerator and a volume in the denominator, the mile per gallon does have the dimensions of the reciporical of area. This means that we can express the integrated luminosity of the LHC in miles per gallon, a concept that the typical person on the street, or even an elected official, can understand. So how much mileage has the LHC delivered this year?
1 pb^-1 = 10^12 b^-1 * (1 b/10^-28 m^2) * (10^-3 m^3/1 liter) * (1 km/10^3 m) * 3.79 liters/gallon * 0.621 miles/km = 2.35 x 10^34 miles/gallon.
The LHC has delivered 26 pb^-1 in 2011, or 6.1 x 10^35 MPG. This is a huge number! The LHC is thus by far the most fuel efficient machine on Earth, and thus it should be of great interest to people everywhere who are interested in reducing our use of fossil fuels, protecting the environment and so forth. Such a fabulous device is surely worth supporting with taxpayer dollars.