World's Largest Atom Smasher Nears Completion

evanwired writes "The last magnet was put in place this week at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. When the device is completed about a year from now it will be the world's largest particle accelerator, putting scientists in reach of new data and possible answers to questions dominated by theory over observation for the past two decades. Wired News recently visited the installation — awe-inspiring in its scale — as part of an in-depth, three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century."

Caution - low-flying quarks

[billstewart (78916)]

Watch out for leftover jaggedy fragments of atoms. And if CERN gets involved, there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.

Re:Caution - low-flying quarks

[eclectro (227083)]

there may be some technology spinoffs about displaying mixtures of pictures and text on the Internet.

Because smashing atoms the old way was sooo Web 1.0

Re:

[The Zon (969911)]

This is tremendous improvement over the Small Hadron Collider, which was only big enough to smash one atom at a time. The Large Hadron Collider will smash at least two, which is the minimum number of atoms for a Web 2.0 social framework.

Watch out for J0hn Tit0r

[CDMA_Demo (841347)]

I think he's on his way to completion as well.

Re:Caution - low-flying quarks

[aweraw (557447)]

I'm more concerned about the probability of a resonance cascade scenario...

By the way, have you seen my crowbar?

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

Yeah, I think only about 2 people would have got it if you hadn't pointed it out, hi-larious..!

Sorry :p

Quick!

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Somebody wake Jodie Foster up, the machine is nearly ready!

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

We'll see about that!

-Crazy Religious Nutjob

Acknowledgement ...

[foobsr (693224)]

To whom it conCERN [web.cern.ch]s.

The world seems to be more complex than just wired up.

CC.

Re:Acknowledgement ...

[DAldredge (2353)]

Cool - I didn't know CERN was on the web :)

Re:

[The_Wilschon (782534)]

I'm assuming that you just left out your [/sarcasm] tag, but I'll still say this for the poor people who don't know. CERN [info.cern.ch] started the web [wikipedia.org].

you know duck scientists are having a field day...

[Bananatree3 (872975)]

when you hear a rising call from their labs...Quarrk, Quarrkk, Quark!

Re:

[Bananatree3 (872975)]

What do the kitten scientists say, "Muon, muon"?

That would be the cow scientists.

Black holes

[Dan East (318230)]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet? Maybe a little sightseeing on the ISS would be a good idea about that time. That would buy me a couple extra weeks.

Dan East

Re:

[Durrok (912509)]

I somehow doubt a black hole appearing around what you are orbiting would do you much good :p

Re:Black holes

[Atlantis-Rising (857278)]

The swartzchild radius of a black hole with the mass of the earth is, IIRC, 9 millimeters.
I have no idea what the LHC is supposed to do, but if it turns the earth into a blackhole (which seems fantastically unlikely to me, but then, I'm no physicist either), yeah the ISS will be out of the atmosphere.
Unless the earth gains an accretion disk...

Re:Black holes

[delt0r (999393)]

There is no way to turn the earth into a black hole. \. people read to many Nexus magazines and newpapers. NewScientist is almost as bad.

First of all there are particles hiting the earth with more energy than the LHC will produce, so if it can produce them it won't be the first one created on earth. Secondly even if it can produce a black hole (very cool by the way) it will evaporate in like 10^-20 seconds. Thridly a black hole does not change the gravity of the contained mass. So a black hole made out of a few quarks is going to have the gravitational pull of a few quarks. aka none.

Re:Black holes

[fred fleenblat (463628)]

The thinking is that any black holes that are created by the LHC would be so small that they would evaporate in an instant, probably within milliseconds of devouring the earth and sun. So there's nothing to worry about really.

Re:Black holes

[Danga (307709)]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about. I have read a few articles on the subject and it seems highly unlikely anything catastrophic could happen if small black holes are created. Here are some quotes from one interesting article http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060919_b lack_holes.html [livescience.com]:

"Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, before they could gobble up any significant amount of matter"

and

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

"However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

So, if Hawking is right we should be safe and even if he is wrong it sounds like we should still be safe. Of course nobody knows for sure which is somewhat scary but I don't think it means we should scrap the whole project in this particular case.

Re:Black holes

[klaun (236494)]

Is this the collider that could possibly create a black hole that would destroy the planet?

I don't think there is really much to worry about.

It's also worth noting that while the collisions in HLC will be on the order of 10^12 electron volts... cosmic ray collisions with the earth on the order of 10^20 electron volts occur on a regular basis. If any Earth consuming blackholes were going to be created... they'd probably have already happened.

Re:

[Danga (307709)]

Yes, you are correct and in the article I linked to above they mentioned that (although not in as much detail as you):

"CERN spokesman and former research physicist James Gillies also pointed out that Earth is bathed with cosmic rays powerful enough to create black holes all the time, and the planet hasn't been destroyed yet."

Re:Slightly less than 10^20

[tkittel (619119)]

I am sorry, but while relatively well informed, your post is not right on the mark.

First of all, particles of energies higher than 10^20eV have been observed in several experiments since the first observation in Utah in 1991. Just google for ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) or "oh my god particle". The existence of these particles above the GZK cut-off is not really a disputed fact.

The study and theoretical understanding of these UHECRs are in fact becoming a sub-field of its own today, and I have seen it come up again and again in the last couple of years at conferences.

The point here is that the GZK cut-off only applies to particles originating _very_ far away (more than 50 mega parsecs), since an UHECR produced "locally" could reach us without having a significant change to interact with the cosmic microwave background. The current theoretical puzzlement thus does not have to do with the observation of particles violating some fundamental law, but is due to the fact that people do not know of any "local" source in our neighbourhood which could produce particles of such high energies. There is certainly no indication that this affects the SM, and certainly not the big bang theory.

Of course, as a particle physicist, I would *hope* that the effects are due to physics beyond the SM, but I would guess it is more likely that the answer is going to be that we do not understand all astrophysical objects as well as we had hoped.

Re:Black holes

[ImaNihilist (889325)]

They weren't exactly sure what would happen when they set off the first atom bomb either.

Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.

Re:Black holes

[Danga (307709)]

Honestly, I hope everyone's wrong and some kind of crazy black hole forms. Yeah, we'd all die...but what a way for a civilization to end! I mean, we gotta' at least out do the dinosaurs.

Ha, I agree that we must out do the dino's, that would be quite funny. The problem with wiping ourselves out with a black hole is a passing alien craft may detect a black hole where our civilization used to be but they would probably have no idea we even existed.

That is why I think wiping ourselves out with self-replicating nano bots would be much more funny. Then a passing alien craft would come across a milky way sized swarm of these nano bots and think to themselves "what dumbass civilization did this to themselves?".

Re:Black holes

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

>"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?

Re:

[Iron Condor (964856)]

>"It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?

Actually it sounds like a quote from the Earth Destruction Manual [qntm.org], which starts "Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.[...]"

Not to worry, it would have already happened

[ebers (816511)]

Physicists are hoping that they will see signs of tiny black holes forming and instantly evaporating. If they can be produced by the energies of the LHC, then they are already being produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays, which have far more energy per particle (up to 10^20 eV) than what the LHC can do. (7*10^12 eV). see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cos mic_ray [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Kabuthunk (972557)]

Even if a tiny black hole were to be created, it would likely disappear almost instanteously via Hawking Radiation. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for details.

The concerns regarding it however are:
Creation of a stable black hole
Creation of strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
Creation of magnetic monopoles that could catalyze proton decay
Triggering a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum

Wikipedia mentions the black hole would likely disappear, but it didn't mention anything regarding the o

Re:

[The_Wilschon (782534)]

These concerns were already raised with the startup of RHIC. Nothing has happened yet (although that doesn't mean that nothing will happen). Cosmic rays, however, have much higher energies, and when they collide with other particles (for instance, molecules of our atmosphere), much higher energy densities are reached. This has been going on for billions of years, and nothing has happened yet, which suggests that the probability of LHC or RHIC causing such an event are almost certainly exceedingly small.

Re:

[Broken scope (973885)]

The actual black hole isn't that large, they have huge amounts of mass. Mass that is linked to their size. They can be big and small.

Re:Black holes

[PieSquared (867490)]

A black hole *might* not actually need to be super massive, it just has to be huge to be seen beyond the solar system. As for the basic physics part, pretty much yes - a few atoms properly smashed could take up 0 space, have an event horizon, and totally block light outside the actual mass... making it a black hole. Such an object could in theory destroy each additional atom it hit, slowly growing as it went back and forth through the earth until the entire earth was a part of it. The problem, though, is threefold. First, black holes emit energy, and a small black hole would probably emit energy faster then it could gain energy, meaning it would die pretty much instantly. (*far* less then a second). Second, if the black hole didn't disappear instantly, it would probably be thrown out of earth orbit by the massive speed of the device. Finally, the black holes would be so small that they wouldn't actually hit protons very often. This sounds odd, but the same thing is true of galaxies... the milky way one day will hit the andromada galaxy, but statistically there will be about 6 collisions of stars before it becomes one stable system. The nucleus of an atom is just so small in comparison to the space the atom takes up due to its electron shell... and of course the event horizon for such a small black hole would be incredibly small (much smaller then the original particles). The belief is that if despite all odds a stable black hole was created and fell into the ground, the sun would go nova before we noticed anything wrong with the earth because of the black hole. In conclusion, a small black hole probably can't exist. Well, at least on the several atoms scale. Even if it can exist (we don't really know for sure that it can't) it won't do any real damage to earth. I guess flinging black holes into space might not be a great idea on the multi-billion year scale, but within the probable lifespan of humanity probably nobody would notice.

Jumbonium smasher!

[Majik Sheff (930627)]

I was wondering when we'd have the equipment to smash the world's largest atom!

Re:

[Dunbal (464142)]

Wait... do Kansans believe in atoms?

      Of course they do. What they DON'T believe in is radioactive decay...

Politics of high-end theoretical physics

[by Anonymous Coward]

I hear they're trying to pass a law in congress defining a traditional meson as being between one quark and one anti-quark.

In the mean time....

[stox (131684)]

HEP research in the United States is grinding to a halt. The DOE has nothing on the board for Fermilab, SLAC, etc. past 2010. While I admire and respect the work the Europeans are doing ( with little help from the US ), I am deeply concerned that this nation is losing its way. Basic R&D is the foundation that made the US what it was in the 20th century. We are doing less and less of it everyday. Unless the Clowns^H^H^H^H^HEsteemed politicians in Washington wake up soon, the US will soon become a second rate nation.

Re:

[JudgeFurious (455868)]

I think it's probably a bit past their wake up time actually. An argument could easily be made that the US is already a second rate nation whose residents continues to live a first rate life thanks to their rapidly eroding credit rating. It won't be long before reality comes calling.

 

Re:In the mean time....

[realmolo (574068)]

That's because there's no good way to "monetize" physics. If the particle-accelerator crowd wants funding they need to find a way to:

1. Allow teenagers to upload videos to the accelerator 2. Allow teenagers to download ringtones from the accelerator 3. Allow teenagers to instant-message entangled particles on the other side of the universe

Re:

[starwed (735423)]

Interestingly enough, I've heard that SLAC gets some of their funding from private companies now, (Microsoft, Google, etc...), on the order of a few hundred million dollars.

Re:In the mean time....

[Markus Registrada (642224)]

If high-energy-physicists had any questions they wanted answers to, there might be more reason to invest in expensive toys for them. As it happens, they all seem tied up doing string theory, which (notoriously) offers no predictions to test.

In the meantime, condensed-matter physicists, fluid-dynamic physicists, and plasma physicists (not to mention meteorologists, metabolic geneticists, and what-have-you) have never swung the kind of budgets you get, evidently, from having made an atom bomb once, despite that each group have collectively produced far more positive and far fewer negative effects on our daily lives.

(No, I'm not in any of those groups.)

Astronomers sometimes do swing big budgets, but they deliver astonishingly pretty pictures of stuff that really is out there -- however much they prefer to talk about stuff that's not in the pictures. Long after they've all changed their minds about the latter, we'll still have the pictures.

Speaking personally (and at deep risk of spiteful moderation) I wouldn't mind a century-long hiatus in particle-accelerator funding. There's plenty of science to be done by regular grad students at regular workbenches, and to much greater (perhaps even beneficial!) effect.

Mod Parent Up, Please

[littlewink (996298)]

The parent makes a point that should be stressed.

High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.

Astrophysicist David Lindley wrote The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory [amazon.com], a book that explains the current state of affairs in high-energy physics and astrophysics.

As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.

Re:

[radtea (464814)]

High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable.

One of the things that differentiates science from other areas of human endeavour is that science uses up fields of study. Once upon a time there was a major scientific enterprise involving filling out the peroidic table. New elements were isolated every few years. Eventually, all the blanks were filled in, leaving only a very small number of labs pursuing the trans-uranics.

In traditional

Re:More research?

[arthurpaliden (939626)]

The reason why research is slowly grinding to a halt in the United States is because the people of the United States have finaly realized that you do not have to spend billions of dollars to get the answers to 'life the universe and every thing else". Just go to the holy book of your choice. The answers are all there.

Higgs boson

[Dachannien (617929)]

So, how long until we discover the mass of the Higgs boson, thus compressing the Earth down to the size of a pea [wikipedia.org]?

You can help!

[foreverdisillusioned (763799)]

This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home project [web.cern.ch] lets you donate your spare CPU c

Re:You can help!

[Phanatic1a (413374)]

The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion.

Huh? You're making that up. Completely making that up. Compute particle energy x number of particles in the loop, it's nothing in macroscopic terms. LHC will be capable of heavy ion collisions at energy levels of 1150 teraelectron volts, which sounds really impressive (and it is, on the quantum scale), but here in the big world that's only one ten-thousandth of a joule.

LHC@home

[burrows (112035)]

It may be worth noting that some of the design work on this amazing project was actually done by Slashdot readers with no background in particle accelerators. LHC@home [lhcathome.cern.ch] is a distributed computing project using the SixTrack program that helps simulate particles' travel in the accelerator to study the stability of their orbits. It has been critical data to the scientists that have been working on the project.

Large Hadron Collider

[johansalk (818687)]

Interesting, no one in this thread has "misspelt" it yet as the large hardon collider.

Not very accurate

[parrillada (264680)]

From the article:
"The LHC will reach an unprecedented level of energy called the Terascale (a trillion electron volts [...] This is unexplored territory, not only because no laboratory has ever reached this high..."

The Tevatron (the largest particle accelerator in the USA) has a CM evergy of 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). That, incidentally, is where it gets its name: the TEVatron.

Superconducting Super Collider

[Mr.Sharpy (472377)]

What is unfortunate is that the superconducting super collider, cancelled 13 (!!) years ago, would have had an energy level nearly three times higher than the LHC. Had it not been canceled in favor of the ISS, it would have been completed by now and working to answer the questions of the universe. The U.S. is losing (already lost?) its edge.

Re:

[Dunbal (464142)]

specifically seeking this set of conditions, and ignoring unknown data that simply doesnt fit, I think that's somewhat biased...

      Yes, it is biased. Imagine you have a bag filled with 100,000,000 marbles. 99,999,999 of them are green. Only one of them is blue. You could swear that you had a blue marble in there. What are you going to do? Empty the sack and ignore all the green marbles until you find the blue one - right?