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So the big bad doomsday machine gets turned on tomorrow and the world ends. Apparently. Anyone know what time the thing is going to be switched on? I'll make sure I'm in bed with my head under the covers.

My credit card bill is due to be paid on Monday. I'll wait until Thursday to pay it - just in case !

Have you noticed that the weeks have been going past quicker lately?

maybe they have already switched it on.

Well it'd be really inconsiderate if the world does end, I'm going to a fancy dress party at the weekend and I've spent ages making my costume

So, if the Earth gets sucked into a black hole while I'm on a plane will we have to land on the moon?

I'm so excited about this. Properly excited. Here's a quick explanation for the terrified.

Engineering had the Apollo program, physics has the Large Hadron Collider. All it will do is accelerate two streams of protons around a 27Km accelerator and collide them head-on with about the same energy as two battleships hitting each other at 30Mph. But because protons are so small, something rather special happens. To get a handle on it, imagine that you're from a race of giant aliens...

To you, the Earth is really tiny but you want to know what these vanishingly small things called cars are made of. The most basic way of finding out is to break them open, but you need a tool to do it. What about using other cars, smashing them into each other and taking measurements of the debris? You do the experiment and discover engines, wheels, and so on. But what's an engine made of? So, you design an experiment to smash engines into each other and discover camshafts, pistons, and so on. That's basically what they're doing at CERN: smashing atomic cars together and working out what makes them go. But why? Here comes the science bit...

There's a piece of maths called the Standard Model. Starting with particles that are well understood, such as photons and electrons, it goes on to predict other types of particle from their predicted interactions with the ones that have been found. Over the years, experiments have shown the Standard Model to be accurate because the particles it predicts have all been found... except one. None of the particles discovered are heavy enough to explain why things are so heavy. The Standard Model says there's one left to find. It's named after Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, and will provide a relationship between what's known about how matter works and gravity (which no one understands). It belongs to a group of particles called Bosons. It's the Higgs Boson. It turns out that you have to smash protons with two battleship's worth of energy to break them apart sufficiently to release Higgs Bosons, hence the need for the LHC.

But what will that give mankind? Ultimately, have you ever wanted to press a button on your belt and fly? Understanding gravity and the Higgs Boson is the start of that ability.

So, what's this rather special thing that's going to happen? Well, the LHC will recreate the conditions present about a billionth of a second after yer actual Big Bang. For the first time, mankind is getting access to the point of creation itself - the real creation story, sans apples, sans serpents, definitely sans giant elephants riding on the backs of turtles, etc. (where this leaves the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I have no idea). Essentially, it's a machine for looking about as far back in time as it's possible to go. Only for a trillionth of a second at a time, and in a space so small that a speck of dust looks like a city, which is why the four detection experiments are incredibly sensitive and the size of cathedrals - to make sure they capture everything that happens in that tiny split second.

Are we all going to die? Eventually, yes, we all do, but not as a result of the LHC. The energies involved are FAR too low to produce a black hole. And if one were to appear spontaneously, it would immediately pop out of existence in a puff of Hawking radiation. Even if it were a theoretical risk, it won't happen on Wednesday. Beams have already been partially circulated (that happened a month ago). Tomorrow is just the first (historic? We'll see.) time a bean has been sent around the entire ring. The first collisions aren't planned until 21st October.

The LHD cost $10 billion. Wouldn't it have been better to feed the poor with that money? The same argument was levelled at Apollo, and yes, of course it would be better to do that. So, where did the money come from? It was granted by governments with enough salted away to, in the words of Bill Hicks, feed, clothe, house, educate and provide healthcare for every man, woman and child on this planet many times over and STILL have plenty left over to be able to explore both inner and outer space in peace FOREVER.

But what will that give mankind? Ultimately, have you ever wanted to press a button on your belt and fly? Understanding gravity and the Higgs Boson is the start of that ability.

that will really shag David Copperfield wouldnt it?

daleshrimpton wrote:

But what will that give mankind? Ultimately, have you ever wanted to press a button on your belt and fly? Understanding gravity and the Higgs Boson is the start of that ability.

that will really shag David Copperfield wouldnt it?

have you ever wanted to press a button on your belt and fly?

I don't have buttons on my fly, it's a zipper.....

Does anyone have that poster that reads
"Large Hadron Collider; It's killing us September 2008" ??

Now I see.

For a moment I thought we'd started playing a new kind of Mornington Crescent...

Oh silly me.

Pete

we have to wait, it will still take quite some time before it gets to speed or so I've read. So I am back to sitting on my front stoop waiting for the next Ice age to begin.

Yup. The data generated by each collision event will run into terabytes. It'll apparently take until about January to figure out what it all means. Maybe the first significant announcement will be that we all died in a huge black hole the previous September

The people sending death threats to CERN don't seem to realise that there are collisions going on in the atmosphere all the time involving high energy cosmic rays of far higher energies than even the planned successor to LHC could ever hope to achieve.

Tomo wrote:The people sending death threats to CERN don't seem to realise that there are collisions going on in the atmosphere all the time involving high energy cosmic rays of far higher energies than even the planned successor to LHC could ever hope to achieve.

Yeah, but knowing things like that takes all the fun out of thinking something might kill us all!