Large Hadron Collider tour photos up
There is an awesome article in Scientific American this month that explains the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest and most complicated particle physics experiment ever seen.
This is an amazing machine and will probably lead to revolutionary understandings of how everything works. What are they looking for? The Higgs Particle, (believed to be responsible for imbuing other particles with mass).
This is a must read article for those who care about science and our understandings of the world.
I just uploaded a bunch of photos I took on our CERN tour on Saturday morning and will have the video of the tour up on March 3 as part of our launch package on FastCompany.tv.
After this summer it will be impossible to tour the collision chamber while the machine is running because when the experiment is running it will be quite dangerous to be down there.
Thank you so much to Ben Segal (computer geek) and Frank Taylor (physicist) for giving us the tour. If you don’t know Ben, you should. He was Tim Berners-Lee’s mentor at CERN. Has worked in the computing center there since the 1970s and was responsible for bringing TCP/IP and Unix to CERN. Both of which were pre-existing conditions for Tim’s invention of the Web.
I loved the sticker on the computer that Tim used to invent the World Wide Web. It says, in Tim’s own handwriting, “This is a server. Do not power it down!” Yeah, that was the first Web server. It was like going to church for me.
UPDATE: If you visit the “CERN” tag over on Flickr you’ll find tons of other photos, including some other people who were on the same tour.
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February 11th, 2008 at 6:36 am
aaaargh.. so jealous. How awesome, lucky beastie.
Great article link too.
I’ll watch out for the vid on fastcompany.tv :-D
February 11th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Is… is that a Higgs boson on the floor in that first picture?!?
February 13th, 2008 at 8:40 am
The LHC is a truely awesome machine, and the engineering challenges to get it to work are immense, including things you wouldn’t think of, like the particle dump.
The amount of power contained in the beam is phenomenal, and dissipating that amount of heat is a surprisingly hard challenge.
Personally, I’m hoping not that they’ll find the Higgs, but that they’ll see something completely unexpected, opening up a whole new branch of inquiry.
Also, everyone focuses on the giant CMS and ATLAS experiements, but some of the smaller ones like LHCb are interesting too, working on things like CP-violation (the idea that anti-matter behaves differently to matter) and suchlike.
Makes me glad I’m studying Physics right now :)
February 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
[...] Scoble has a post on the CERN tour and some great pictures on his blog, including the one [...]
February 15th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Did you also see the computing center at CERN? They’ve got a few massive sets of machines and they also have the Internet Exchange point for that part of Europe.
These machines are the local computer clusters and a huge Oracle database cluster.
Did you also got a talk about how the data is going to be analyzed? In this case by using a computer Grid to consolidate all the computer cluster and storage resources of the participating institutes into one logical system.
This is LCG (LHC Computing Grid) which spans the globe to receive, distribute, storage and number crunch on the ~15 PetaByte a year that only Atlas is producing (and there are three more of these experiments using the LHC).
If you happen to be in Amsterdam, contact me and you can tour the biggest Internet Exchange point on the planet and the rest of our lab. ;-)
February 15th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
there is nothing in the universe without mass the sooner all concerned realise the quicker they will understand you waste your time the universe is smaller than your imagination the universe is finite i, we, you, us and them will never know what a bummer good luck
February 25th, 2008 at 2:36 am
[...] Фото - со Скобловской экскурсии по Большому Адронному Коллайде…. [...]
March 1st, 2008 at 11:42 pm
[...] Scoble also got a tour of the LHC, led around by Frank Taylor, a prof from MIT I know. Scoble has a huge readership in the world of tech-blogging (one of the “a-list” bloggers). [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
is all this in anyway contributing to the prevention of climate change?would the billions not be better spent to improve the living conditions without damaging the environment?
here are all the superbrains fartarsing around theorising slapping each other on the back getting paid enourmous salaries for what.Is the price of bread geiing cheaper?who wants to live on mars?
the brains should be utilised to create a peaceful world where man and nature can co-exist withpout harming the planet which is mankinds only home
April 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
As the founder of the Christian Film & Television Commission and the website http://www.movieguide.org, and a devoted Christian, it is my considered and expert opinion that such research by CERN is a complete waste of time and money.
Intelligent Design will explain all the universe to Man, we we the children of God will only turn to the Bible. I have no understanding of biology, or most sciences, and treat Darwin’s theories with the requisite contempt due from my belief system. Therefore I can say with certainty that the statement “God did it” or “God created it” or “It’s one of God’s Mysteries” will easily and satisfactorily cover any and all questions to arise from Satan’s lapdog, “science”.
America needs to stop sliding away from the fundamentalist Christianity that blessed our Founding Fathers into starting this intentionally Christian nation of America. The Bible is the Word of God, and that Word is final on all topics, including the subatomic.
April 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Esteemed Dr. Ted:
How I’d love to believe it was really you who posted! Thank goodness your message magically appeared and you didn’t have to utilize technology which sprang forth from Satan’s lapdog (is it a West Highland Terrier…by the way?) Good luck with your dot org site. Maybe CERN will blink and shut it down for a few days!
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:19 am
I sympathize with #9, above. Why, indeed, pursue such esoteric science now, when we are confronted with such practical, immediate problems on Earth today? I’d be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on this question.
I consider myself a man of science, and I believe we can’t wait for a perfect world before we do our science (we would wait forever) - but the LHC nonetheless provokes this question in me. I touch on this in my blog entry here:
http://blog.uslegal.com/2008/04/16/large-hadron-collider-front-row-seat-to-the-big-bang/
The entry is mainly an attempt at a part humorous / part serious look at the simmering LHC safety concerns and the Sancho lawsuit to halt start-up.
Enjoyed your pictures, especially of the first Internet server’s sticker (!) thanks.
Bryan
April 26th, 2008 at 7:17 am
In the past month or so, I have been doing research almost daily regarding the LHC at CERN, also learning of the GRID as well.
In response to the money being better spent, to help the world, etc… it already has. If you do a little searching, you will find that the development of the GRID has answered scientific questions that help with health issues, such as finding a cure for a strain of milaria, that would have otherwise taken computers 400 plus years to solve… doing research on global warming… to save the planet… etc… please, before you respond, do some research of your own!
Now for my fear, being a fairly simple person, I wonder that re-creating the big bang… won’t re-create everything, from scratch. Now, I know that sounds simple and silly, but… from what I have read, there is a small chance, that a black hole could float down to the center of the earth and swallow it up? sounds like star trek or something, huh, maybe smaller than a Higgs boson (which they aren’t even sure exists), but the chance DOES exist… which is my point.
Sometimes science gets ahead of humanity. It makes me think of a baby playing with a hand grenade, most likely he won’t figure out how to pull the pin… does that make it ok to let him play with it?
What makes us different than the animals, is the fact that humans are capable of thinking before reacting, which turns it into an action. When someone reacts without thinking, we call them an animal.
The scientists at CERN, the backers, the governments, the warriors, are scaring me, because I am not sure they have really considered that they could be pulling the pin, like that unsupervised baby might…
April 26th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
THEORETICALLY, THE MOST PROBABLE OUTCOME AT CERN LHC, WOULD BE A QUANTUM INVERSION INDUCTION WAVE FUNCTION / ORIGINATING AT THE IMPACT TARGET COORDINATES / BETWEEN 200-400 TeV / CREATING A CAUSALITY LOOP BACKWASH THROUGH THE SUPER-CONDUCTORS, AND CLOSING INSIDE THE HADRON UNIT ITSELF! A WORMHOLE WITH RELATIVISTIC SHIFTS, FOR 12-30 HOURS, OUTWARD PERIMETER 30-60 MILES; DISSIPATION OF TIME DILATION SHOULD OCCUR AFTER LHC EMERGENCY SHUT-DOWN! THE HIGGS PARTICLE WOULD BECOME ONLY A SECONDARY DISCOVERY OF LESSER CONSEQUENCE!
April 28th, 2008 at 6:54 am
This is a quote from:
http://www.notepad.ch
What it is like to work here
The following quote is from a blog at Cernwatch.com, apparently from an insider at CERN LHC:
‘I am writing this blog becuase I am seeing some strange things that I have not seen before. I notice higher levels of security, and more US military presence. I hear strange rumors and weird Jokes. I think that there is more going on that what is being let out. i will report to you everything I hear and see.’
This is a quote from:
http://www.notepad.ch