Message boards : LHC@home Science : An impossible machine that could not be built
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Professor Ray

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Message 21622 - Posted: 15 Nov 2009, 21:29:57 UTC
Last modified: 15 Nov 2009, 21:48:19 UTC

El Reg's LHC visit - Deleted Scenes
An impossible machine that could not be built


By Lewis Page

Posted in Physics, 8th November 2009 10:02 GMT


The Large Hadron Collider - the gigantic underground double-barrelled particle cannon assembled by top boffins deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border - is to start up again around the 20th of this month. Not only is the LHC tremendously cool (quite literally) in its own right, it's also the focus of a global hypercomputing grid of tremendous potency, giving us an excuse to go and visit it this week.

[snip]

Sadly the Collider is now largely chilled down to firing temperature, and parts of it are already having test beams fired along them, so it's now pretty difficult for visits to get down into the various underground caverns and tunnels containing the actual good bits. Even the CERN boffins have to undergo a retina scan to get down there now, we were told, for security and radiation-safety reasons. (It has to be a live eyeball, too, according to our hosts.)

As a result we don't have any first-hand pics of the underground bits. Nor did we manage to sneak down there anyway, get zapped by a freak blast of krenon-rays or something and acquire mysterious mutant powers or turn green and swell into a enormous monster journalist able to crumple up impertinent press officers like paper cups.

[snip]

When the LHC was first conceived it was an impossible machine that could not be built, but it is working now... it is one of the coldest and emptiest places in the universe - there are less atoms inside the tubes than there are in outer space, and at less than 2 degrees above absolute it is colder than the average temperature of the universe.

I could go on telling you fascinating and unique facts all day, but let me sum up by saying this - doing this experiment is more complicated than sending a man to the moon, and it is not us who says this but those who did send men to the moon.

Bertolucci even went so far as to apparently hint at an interdimensional portal invasion of some sort, though no doubt we misunderstood.

[snip]

[excerpted: read entire 4 page article at: http://www.theregister...lhc_supplemental
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Message 21626 - Posted: 16 Nov 2009, 22:07:57 UTC

Ray do you know something about, if we get any data soon? Or will it all go to the grid system?
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Professor Ray

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Message 21633 - Posted: 19 Nov 2009, 1:53:03 UTC
Last modified: 19 Nov 2009, 1:53:59 UTC

You should check out the apologies thread in the Cafe.

That\'s all I know about it.
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Message boards : LHC@home Science : An impossible machine that could not be built


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