LHC

[liadnan]

Adam Hart-Davis is currently on Radio 4 being taken round the Large Hadron Collider. From his description it appears to be suspiciously akin to the set for the climactic scenes of a James Bond film. Pashazade and I suspect the Welsh one who didn't quite get to say "Energise the Large Hadron Collider", possibly because that would have sounded silly. "Throw open the switches on the sonic oscillator... and step up the reactor power input Three More Points" would have been perfectly appropriate though.

I confess there was a part of me that wanted to hear a few seconds of dead silence after they started, followed by a very quiet "Oh... Shit." But hey, isn't it supposed to be the Big Mistake of '08 that drives us into space?

PS Diamond Geezer on the Mail's take.

Comments

[susumu.livejournal.com]

They should have built the thing on credit, and then phoned the UN and said "Give us $5bn or we'll turn it on".

[lebeautemps.livejournal.com]

Perfectly appropriate - And it being radio, we'd be spared the sight of him in black stockings, huh.

[liadnan]

Surely One Meeelion Dollars

[susumu.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't even buy you a Small Hadron Collider at today's prices.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

"And underground, quietly and without fuss, the black holes were coming on."

[tree_and_leaf]

All the same, the Mail's article was less embarrassingly stupid than Michelle Hanson's attempts to comment in the Grauniad yesterday (We might well all be eaten by black holes because of those crazy mad scientists! It's just like the Quatermass Experiment where the earth was destroyed by alien spores brought back from space!)

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

5 trillion dollars seems to be about right for US government credit issues these days.

[liadnan]

Apropos of nothing in particular I just went and read the Have Your Say column (cue irony re people complaining about the cost of Cern's LHC on, err, a website) and thought this was a particular gem:-

Unless speed of light is imparted to hadrons, they are on a wild goose chase. The results will just not be able to penetrate beyond the blinds. Consider a man being aroused to a point close to the climax, leaving him just short of ejaculation. Will he be ever able to describe orgasm and post-orgasmic hangover or will his body chemistry match with that of a ejaculating male? So attaining speed of light is paramount to their objective else its just good enough for Guinness book.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

(Repost)

Even if the LHC were going to cause the End of the World, it's not currently colliding hadrons at all: they're circulating protons in one direction to test the magnetics and electric fields and so forth. The first collisions are scheduled for October 21. In any case, the smart money seems to be on black holes being created - if they're created at all - in the Super LHC, an upgraded version of the same hardware that may, depending on funding, come online in 2012.

They're also going to do experiments using relativistic heavy ions instead of protons, which no doubt will give the doom-mongers another round of publicity.