World may end in August 2008

[Rodox]

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/index.html

According to this site

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/about-the-lhc/who-benefits.html
Who benefits?
There are two types of benefit that the LHC project produces for the UK. The less easily measured benefits are:

new understanding of the physical world,
training of world class scientists and engineers,
maintenance of a vibrant, world class UK research base and,
a leading role in a major international project.
More easily appreciated are the knowledge, expertise and technology that is spun off from the LHC and can be directly applied to development of new medical, industrial and consumer technologies.

The science of the LHC is far removed from everyday life, but the fact that the science is so extreme constantly pushes the boundaries of existing technical and engineering solutions. Simply building the LHC has generated new technology.

The LHC is not primarily about building a better world. Rather, it allows us to test theories and ideas about how the Universe works, its origins and evolution. The questions asked, and answers found, are so fundamental that the information from LHC experiments will only be applied many years in the future, if at all. However, this is an experiment and one of the surprises from the experiment may be new science that can be applied almost immediately.

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This is about advancing science(and with this comes the benefits) and nothing else.

 

[sabbath92002]

A month from Wednesday is dooms day, it was nice knowing you all

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jj8FEmbV51mefR7brcbExIAOOtTQD931VSPO1

GENEVA (AP) — It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro "black holes" and endanger the planet.

The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project's price tag of nearly $4 billion.

"This only happens once a generation," said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. "People are certainly very excited."

The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages.

The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border.

Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel.

CERN dismisses the risk of micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project. They unsuccessfully mounted a similar action in 1999 to block the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.

CERN's collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN.

Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons — previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom — were made of still smaller quarks and gluons.

CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.

Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman's terms.

The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or "A Large Ion Collider Experiment" — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang.

"We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other," Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN.

"This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma."

The soup cools quickly and the quarks and gluons stick together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.

That will enable scientists to look for still missing pieces to the puzzle — or lead to the formulation of a new theory on the makeup of matter.

Kate McAlpine, 23, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has produced the Large Hadron Rap, a video clip that has attracted more than a million views on YouTube.

"The things that it discovers will rock you in the head," McAlpine raps as she dances in the tunnel and caverns.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the lyrics are "absolutely scientifically spot on."

"It's quite brilliant," Gillies said.
On the Net:

* CERN: http://www.cern.ch
* Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: http://www.fnal.gov
* The U.S. at the LHC: http://www.uslhc.us/
* Large Hadron Rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vf6aU-wFSqt0

 

[ventriloone]

it sucks because my favorite proff that i was supposed to have this semester is on sebatical in geneva as a theorist for the atlas project so i have retirees (which aren't so bad) as profs this semester.

 

[Helyna]

The LHC is now on... I'm still alive, how about you?

Okay, I know, it'll take at least a month before the black holes form to swallow the Earth. I'm counting down the days.

 

[Ventrilo]

actually they are just warming it up. I believe they're shooting protons at 10 TeV around the collision path, 14 TeV will come soon and then they will collide them after christmas (which is when the black hole will be created for you doom sayers). So you still have a few more months

 

[typewriterx]

I just heard about this yesterday and I'm soooo interested.
Then I decided to research black holes. Woah. Talk about interesting.
WAY over my head though.
Isn't it possibly ending in 2012?

 

[Pyrophosphate]

Isn't it possibly ending in 2012?

You mean the world? Of course it's possibly ending in 2012. It could end tomorrow for all we know. The end of the world is one of those things that's probably better to not try and predict.
And I'm pretty sure the concept of the world ending in 2012 is used mostly by religious fanatics, though it was originally thought of in an episode of X-Files, so I don't think it's very credible.

 

[Helyna]

I just heard about this yesterday and I'm soooo interested.
Then I decided to research black holes. Woah. Talk about interesting.
WAY over my head though.
Isn't it possibly ending in 2012?

Welcome to the speculation!

Yeah, I always had 2012 down as doomsday.

 

[Helyna]

What?? It's out for two months!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080920/ap_on_re_eu/eu_switzerland_particle_collider