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."

In the mean time....

[stox]

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.

Am I reading this wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does it really say "if the information doesn't prove what we want it to, we'll ignore it"?

-"The math alone here is staggering. Somewhere between 600 million and 1 billion collisions will take place each second. Each will leave its mark in the detectors, but the vast majority will be irrelevant to the scientists' goals. Computerized triggers will thus record a specific event only if it matches a predetermined set of conditions, and throw out the rest."

Re:Black holes

[Kabuthunk]

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 others.

Re:In the mean time....

[Markus Registrada]

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.

Re:Black holes

[Iron Condor]

>"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.[...]"

Re:Black holes

[PermanentMarker]

I'm sorry to say but the orignal comment might be true
At least artificaly tiny blackholes have been created by now
(with the gold atoms smashing expiriments) those block holes existed ony a few mili mili seconds but their intake of mass and their behaviour was not normal. Luckly so far these blackholes where not stable.

You can find such info back at newscientist site if yu like.
But don't say i didnt warned you for this.

Re:fnal.gov

[Pictor1973]

The Fermilab Tevatron is currently the largest (6.28 Km in circumference) and highest-energy (about 1/7th of the LHC) running accelerator on earth. It will be second when LHC will get up to speed. Size wise LEP (which used to sit where the LHC is being built) detains the record as the largest accelerator with a 26.6 Km circumference (the same that the LHC will have). Oh another interesting fact: these devices often need to keep their magnets pretty cold (colder than outer space!) and use the la largest refrigerators [airliquide.com] on earth!