Time magazine online put up a series of photos from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, and they’re very pretty. I especially like the photo of the CMS detector (shown here), blurred by rotating the camera a bit. When you read the caption on that photo you’ll see why. 
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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June 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Woah. At that strength, that thing must be huge. I saw the video of you there demonstrating the scale, but it didn’t sink in until now how huge it is.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think I remember reading it was 3 Tesla? (I have no idea what the earth’s magnetic field is, although I could find out in 30 seconds)
Anyway, 3 Tesla = MRI.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
serenity, the LHC will operate at about 8 Tesla (you don’t want to stand too close to that, even if you don’t have a pacemaker), and a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
According to wikipedia: “It was recently announced that the [CMS] magnet will run at 3.8T instead of the full design strength [4T] in order to maximize longevity.”
It’s not that 3.8 tesla isn’t impressive, because it is!
Don’t take this as me trying to correct you, either; it’s not as if 1) this magnet is the only one at the LHC and 2) wikipedia is 100% correct all of the time.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I had the opportunity to visit CERN and see the CMS detector as well. Time’s photos are better, of course, but: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tgerla/sets/72157604515483441/
Phil, I’ll see you at TAM6!
-Tim
June 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Any idea when this thing is supposed to finally be up and running?
June 8th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
100,000 times as strong locally – I wanna see men make one 100,000 times as large and 100,000 times as strong… we might need such a field for something like the mythical hydrogen ram scoop in science fiction space travel.
JBS
June 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
@Tim — I’m jealous! I would love to visit CERN.
That is, indeed, a very impressive picture of the CMS detector. Very pretty.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Jealous. So very very jealous.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Except that the Internet is some 26 years older than WWW. That’s some good reporting, Time.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
The forum mangled my acronym for World Wide Web. Sorry.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
aporeticus: 1990 – 1974 = 16.
Still, not being able to tell the difference between the net and the web has, indeed, been pretty in-excusable for at least half that long.
June 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
@Levi
As far as I know the latest date is in July some time. I can’t wait!
June 8th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Some people are concerned that this thing will destroy the Earth by creating a black hole…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXzugu39pKM
Phil Plait to the rescue?
June 8th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Phil did write an entry about how low the chances are that the LHC will destroy the Earth.
The physics that say a black hole would be made by the LHC also say that such a BH would decay withing too short a time to be a hazard to the Earth (or something like that).
Question:
What is the main hazard from being too close to the magnet of the LHC when in operation? Is is hot, or is it the field?
June 8th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Both. At least, that was my impression.
June 8th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Well, if it’s 100.000 times stronger then the 0.00005 Tesla field of the earth, that puts it at 5 T
A 3 Tesla MRI is strong enough to do this to a chair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uzJPpC4Wuk
So I asume standing near the active LHC with a pacemaker or metal on your bones will be… how to describe it… Chestburster like.
June 8th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Also, does anyone know if they will set up some kind of distributed computing system? I’ve got some spare cycles that i’m willing to donate to science.
(the World Community Grid will just have to settle for half my overhead)
June 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Phil – I’m a regular reader of your blog and sometimes poster. I apologize for the O/T but I keep thinking of questions I want to ask and you don’t have a place for that.
So I’d like to propose you have a place for people like me to post our questions and you can start a topic on them if you think they’re interesting enough.
I read your e-mail page and don’t want to bombard you with more. I get a lot of it myself and often delete real mail accidentally so I don’t see why it can’t happen to me.
Lastly, for quite some time now, my posts are flagged for moderation as potential spam.
I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my e-mail/website combination. But a lot of times my comments don’t get posted until way later so I’m functionally not a part of the conversation. I don’t know if you can fix that or not.
Thanks for the great blog!
June 8th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Ok, now I feel like an idiot. I totally forgot you have a forum.
June 8th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
From what I have heard there are some MRI machines that get up to about 2-3T and there hasn’t been any kind of obvious damage to patients (yet) but there are some concerns about what high strength might do someones health. Though in this case I think it is probably somewhat academic as from what I understand the hallway will be bathed with all kinds of interesting radiation once everything it up and running.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:22 am
OK, I’m missing something.
The caption reads:
“The Magnet Core
Winding the solenoid coil of the CMS took five years to complete. When it is fully operational, it will generate a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the one produced by the Earth.”
Where does this explain why the image is blurred?
June 11th, 2008 at 11:16 am
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