A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider

davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."

Please stop talking about power/energy!

[BlackPignouf]

I'm seriously getting sick of seeing kW/h or energy units used as consumption measure without any context.
Wow.. 'energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts', you say?????
It's almost 7E-13 kWh! So I guess I could power trillions of LHC with just a liter of oil.

Re:"Energy Consumption" - WTF?

[Bazman]

That's more like 'per hadron'. Ask your electricity supplier to bill you per hadron...

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Jamu]

The expense of Physics isn't a problem until it's unaffordable. Physics has always been profitable in the long term, and survives because it's profitable in the short term. And Physics gave you the Space Program.

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[qc_dk]

Well, you used something that came from the CERN collaboration to write your question. I would say that WWW has certainly changed the daily life of almost all of us, and the economic boom that it caused through the 90s has certainly been a bountiful repayment of our investment.

Cheers,
Qc_dk
Ps. I used to work at cern and with the 10'000 men and 2 women there, there certainly was a lot of large hardon collisions. I believe you USians call it cockblocking. ;)

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Loki_1929]

Pure science has no marketable goals in mind. What will the discovery of new particles bring to the world? No one knows, just as no one knew the consequences of the discovery of the electron in 1897. Yet we now have a world where the bulk of the economy is built upon knowing its properties and behavior. Pure science brings about quiet revolutions in unpredictable ways, and those who recognize that realize that funding it is vital to progress. You mention the space program giving us Tang; have you any idea how many commercial products have come about as a direct result of the space program? Any idea of the lives saved and the progress achieved through the struggles brought about by our venturing into space?

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[wanerious]

I'm not trying to be offensive, but that sounds like a remarkably egotistic statement. Should it be required to change your life in any way for you to care about it? Rather than something being wrong with the experiment in that it has no intersection with your interests, perhaps the problem is that your interests are too narrow to accommodate something that (I'd argue) is objectively interesting by any measure. Here is an opportunity for the average person to learn something about the fundamental nature of the Universe to understand the results.

Re:Sexist/Agist

[chribo]

The quoto from the article is definitly wrong. Should be:
"the physics is complex, but the controls are so simple, even a theoretical physicist can use it." ;)
- chribo

Re:Sexist/Agist

[Oink]

I don't know if that's the inside joke I think it is, but I think you're way off base. The theoretical physicists we've had briefly in our lab (for requisite graduate student lab experience) couldn't handle anything more complicated than a pencil! One of them used a gallon jug of acetone to clean something the size of a quarter (exaggerating, but only slightly.)

Re:Two 7TeV Beams = 14TeV collision

[perturbed1]

Err.... Actually, this power does not go into the electromagnets directly. The electromagnets happen to be superconducting magnets, which, once powered, do not require more current. That's not where the power goes. The power goes into keeping it cool. 18kW of synchrotron radiation is dumped into the cryogenics system. The syncrotron radiation is due to the relativistic charged particles curving under the influence of the magnetic fields, but this dumped energy needs to be extracted before it results in a quench. A quench is defined as a superconducting magnet, which has no resistivity, transitioning into the resistive phase, due to the temperature rising locally above the critical point. Here is an interesting link to the power budget of CERN: link [web.cern.ch] As you will see, the LHC eats up little power (given its size) compared to the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) which has conventional magnets and has much smaller radius. The SPS delivers 450MeV protons to the LHC, which then accelerates them upto 14TeV. But the SPS eats up more power than the LHC due to its conventional magnets. Hurray for super-conductivity. ps. you may not have realized this, but might like to know that your post resulted in an excited discussion in at least one CERN corridor...

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Ambitwistor]

The Large Hadron Collider likely will not change your everyday life, unless you're really into physics. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to help the human race learn more about the natural world in which we live.

Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?

Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.

Pastore: Nothing at all?

Wilson: Nothing at all.

Pastore: It has no value in that respect?

Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are
we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

— at the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory

Re:The Problem with Something this Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

for me, it's good enough that the biggest machine on earth does not work for either the military or some corporation, but for the whole of mankind, for future generations and for all of us. that's a very nice thought, i think.

Re:There's a youtube of their IT manager

[Axello]

I would think with a project that's 7 years in the making, that they settle on a stable technology in an early stage. Cell processors are nice, but were they available, oh let's say: last summer?

The early stages of the analysis are often in dedicated hardware, because general purpose processors are not fast enough. You need to connect those systems together as well. Then you need to debug these software beasts, since they need to make a good mathematical analysis 30 million times a second. And with 7000 people waiting for results, you don't want to be caught with a bug...

One more thing on processors:
There's always a better processor on the horizon. Wasn't it NASA that still uses 8086 processors in their Space Shuttle?