Neither baguette-dropping birds nor future sabatoge schemes could stop the LHC this week. And no, the world was not sucked into a black hole, as you may have noticed. Shortly after flinging the first proton beams around the collider, the first particle collisons were recorded. After 14 months of repairs, Cern engineers have got the Large Hadron Collider to smash particles together far sooner than anyone dared hope. For the time being the collisions are low energy, around 450 billion electronvolts per beam, which is around half the energy of what remains, for now, the world’s most powerful particle collider: the Tevatron at Fermilab on the outskirts of Chicago [Guardian]. The LHC’s Atlas detector snapped an image of two counter-rotating proton beams that collided head-on.
Scientists are hopeful that this first collison will lead to smoother operations in the future, but they are being cautious considering the LHC’s laundry list of past failures. The European collider is intended to eventually collide proton beams at an energy of seven trillion electron volts. The first experiments in the LHC are scheduled to take place in early 2010, when researchers will smash subatomic particles into each other at high speeds in order to break them down and allow the discovery of smaller, more fundamental particles [CBC News]. CERN has an image gallery of the LHC’s first run here.
Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: First Collisions in the LHC!
Cosmic Variance: Collisions!
80beats: LHC Flings Protons Once Again; Scientists Celebrate With Caution
DISCOVER: A Tumultuous Year at the LHC
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down by Wayward Baguette Dropped by Bird Saboteur
Discoblog: While LHC Scientists Were Drinking Champagne, Hackers Were Attacking
Image: CERN
November 25th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Sure, THIS world wasn’t sucked in to a black hole, but if you subscribe to the many-world hypothesis and there was a chance of it occurring, somewhere in the multiverse there is one less Earth . . .
Also, these collisions were at far less than full power, even lower than current particle accelerators if I remember correctly. That means we still have a chance at total annihilation. We might even beat the Mayans and destroy ourselves BEFORE 2012; that’ll show those crazy 2012ers . . .
November 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Surely, this article is not claiming that this particle collision is the first of its type.
On the massive scale, obviously, but still, as Nielsen & Ninomiya, have suggested
it is irrelevant to the experiments that will be up-and-running in the next year or two.
So what it works. Don’t doubt the public’s awareness, despite the media’s trend of debunking their claims, because if you have read their three articles, 2007-2009, they don’t claim destruction by black-hole, or mini-singularity, but we could potentially underestimate the effects of the Higgs particle by a factor of 10(34), but that is not all they say…
Nielsen & Ninomiya, may have a fantastic model on their hands, in that, they posit the LHC, the Tevetron, and combined with a “random-quantum-events generator”, could yield, through the theorem of the Feynman path integral, the Higgs Field; and the possibility that the experiment will not work is highly likely, because “the Higgs is abhorrent to nature”, as the popular media keeps claiming to understand such a truth.
Are we going to deny Feynman, Hawking, and even Einstein?
If we pride ourselves upon the unraveling of superstitions, then why, when the biggest experiment in History, and as Lisa Randall recently wrote in an article on this website, the biggest international scientific collaborations ever undergone, have we reverted to such? Don’t forget that…
November 25th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
There is no proof that the LHC will create a black hole, and no proof that Hawking radiation will save the planet if it does. I would not do this experiment until I could move it to some gravity well other than our precious Earth. Without more information, we can’t even estimate the probabilities of what might happen. We are not even 100 percent sure that the standard model is correct. That’s what this experiment is supposed to find out. Perhaps there is some other model that is more accurate, and would give us a reason not to do this, at least as scary as black holes and giant strangelets. Stephen Hawking is betting a hundred bucks with someone that even the LHC does not have enough power to turn up a Higgs boson. If it doesn’t, we will still have nothing but unproven theories.
How much energy would be released if the strangelet scenario turned out to be correct? Perhaps some of the giant flashes seen by our telescopes are caused by beings on other planets doing what we are about to do.
On the other hand, we seem to be destroying this planet’s ability to support us anyway, and we can’t change the social structure that is making us do this. The mean, the stupid and the ignorant will always rise to the top, I suppose, and ruthless, faceless corporations seem to be taking over everything.
Let’s take a chance. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
November 25th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Perhaps YOU people weren’t sucked into an LHC generated black hole, but I was!! I went into the future and you wouldn’t believe it. I have something incredibly important to tell you all, the future of Life, the Universe and Everything may depend on it!
What I have to tell you issss…
(gaack!)
(gasp!)
(shllxkekb!)
nnnooooooooooooooo———————.
November 26th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
LoL.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Steven, keep in mind that if that theory is accurate there are also now infinitely fewer Earths than there were a second ago. Furthermore, in just one second more, we will lose another inifinite number of Earths, and another after that, and so on and so forth for ever and ever.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:38 am
the lhc at this point in time is a very bad idea, there are far to many unknowns.
when they were testing the fist a-bomb they though it might light
the atmosphere on fire, sure it may have not happened in the end but they had to do it because lives were at stake and they had to end a long drawn out war. failure was not an option!
but there is no justifiable reason why we should chance fate a second time over such a small thing.
at this point in history there are more important things, i feel they should postpone the testing for a decade or so and devote those $$$
bones to some thing better like mining asteroids and or developing practical solutions for space flight.
like idk a space shuttle the common man could afford to buy, maintain and operate.
the simple fact of the matter is that these tests have no real world use/applications at the moment.
more over we already have the scientific/technological capability of achieving such feat’s as space flight with out the lhc.
to conclude my rant i ask what is the lhc going to do for me “the common man”? I’ll tell you, “possibly” kill me and every one else, and a whole lota nothing!
and for what to satisfy the curiosity of some egg head whom does not care about my thoughts
ideals and more over my genius!
fool’s, I’ll bet if it was put to a world wide democratic vote today they would be shut down tomorrow!
the end does not justify the means no manner how you dice it what so ever.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Einstein said ’2 things I deem infinite, the Universe and the stupidity of man’. He also explained us what mass is: a hurricane-like vortex of space-time which according to his principle of equivalence between mass and acceleration attracts more the faster it turns. Nobel Prize Wilczek: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/253/ and myself in my work on Non-Euclidean Geometries (expansion of the 5th postulate to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, completing the model: http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings50th/article/view/29/200) showed we can find the mass of all particles by considering the frequency of those vortices. But quantum physicists wouldn’t accept Einstein and when he died tried to promote absurd theories like the ‘Higgs’ particle which nobody knows how can give ‘mass’ to every other particle of the Universe if it is invisible, if particles colliding repel… But Einstein was a lonely genius and quantum physicists were doing Nuclear Bombs and Atomic cannons (LHC is a quark cannon but in Orwellian Newspeak cannon becomes collider). Plainly speaking we do not need this Damocles machine, a 13 billion $ hoax who prevents the expansion of true science, denies Einstein’s work and will produce black holes and Einstein’s quark condensates responsible for nova explosions.
Now this CERN tells us that black holes will evaporate ‘back to the past’ according o another absurd theory of quantum Hawking which says ‘Einstein is double wrong’. He never was proved. Einstein’s theory of black holes thus stands a standard science and his black holes never evaporate but absorb mass in an inverse nuclear bomb: M=E/c2, regardless of size as the essence of relativity is precisely that size doesn’t matter. Quantum gurus pretend that because something is small it will obey quantum laws, which is utter nonsense as a small ant doesn’t obey the laws of bacteria but those of ants. What matters is that black holes are mass/gravitational entities and will obey Einstein’s laws.
So what will happen? Simple, black holes will appear and eat the Earth. It is worth to die to show that Einstein was right? Of course not. Why politicians do nothing? But a marketing campaign has convinced mankind with the hype of replicating the big-bang (‘newspeak’ for the explosion of the Earth) and find the absurd Higgs particle that Nobel Prize Weinberg called the toilet particle to be flush in a vortex of mass of Doctor Einstein as the Earth will be this Christmas. Why the press don’t denounce the first potential genocide of the human species? Do a species of infinite stupidity and arrogance deserves to live? We, humans, will indeed die of infinite stupidity, because an extinct species knows nothing=0 and Knowledge/0=Infinite stupidity. Einstein also said ‘those who pretend to impose truth with power will be the laugh of the gods’. It is about time scientists recognize the bad apples of the fruit of science=weapons, and concentrate in truly explain the Universe. It is about time quantum theorists stop trying to be ‘wannabe Einsteins’ and give back the Caesar what belongs to the Caesar.
November 28th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
“the simple fact of the matter is that these tests have no real world use/applications at the moment.” ???????
GIVE ME A BREAK!
I we ran the world on that basis, combustion would still be explained as the release of phlogiston that mysterious substance having negative weight! Electricity would never have gone past the curious phenomena of things sticking to amber after you rub it.
BASIC RESEARCH is an investment. Not all investments pay off but some will pay handsomely.
November 28th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Thank you ! Research on this or any level is the only to fix the mess naysayers have created.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I thought the churchy ones were nuts! Jeesh, when your ramble is longer than the article, take a breath.
Einstein was the man, but he lived a hundred years ago and was way off on some of his suppositions. Who could forget the penny in the round room conundrum? Or what about the Blodgen ball boondogle? He was lucky to have any career after that embarassment.
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Stephen Hawking dice que Dios no existe. Es verdad. Si existiera, ya lo habrÃa castigado con una terrible enfermedad.
April 16th, 2011 at 10:17 pm
I don’t know why I can’t open the rss to my reader. I can load it using the browser though.