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."

Acknowledgement ...

[foobsr]

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

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

CC.

Re:Black holes

[Atlantis-Rising]

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

[Danga]

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.

You can help!

[foreverdisillusioned]

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 cycles to help calibrate the machine in order to minimize the risk of accidental wall collisions. Come on, I know there must be some physics geeks out there... show your support! Given the sorry state of pure science research in the USA, this may be your only chance...

Not to worry, it would have already happened

[ebers]

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]

LHC@home

[burrows]

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.

Re:Acknowledgement ...

[The_Wilschon]

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].

Re:You can help!

[Phanatic1a]

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.

Not very accurate

[parrillada]

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.

Mod Parent Up, Please

[littlewink]

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.

Superconducting Super Collider

[Mr.Sharpy]

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:you know duck scientists are having a field day

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps that was 3 quarks for muster mark?

Re:Black holes

[delt0r]

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:Slightly less than 10^20

[tkittel]

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.