I’m a fan of the movement which venerates society’s unsung heroes. The nerds, if I’m honest: engineers, physicists, chemists. And thousands of nerds have labored for thousands of days to create the ultimate experimental setup, the Large Hadron Collider. After a rocky start, it’ll be starting back up in June, and guess who’ll be throwing the switch? No, not someone who has anything to do with the thing. They’ve selected a movie star, whose fleeting association with antimatter (the upcoming Angels and Demons) means he’s worthy. Give me a break. → Read More
The world-destroying LHC has been shutdown after a large helium leak on Friday. The two-month hiatus isn’t just to fix the leak, but rather raise the selections temperature from near absolute zero to human survivable temps. Doesn’t this call into question the safety and reliability of the multi-billion dollar project though. The LHC fired up on September 10 for its first experiments and then was quickly shut down due to a faulty transformer a few hours later; now this? Maybe the soothsayers were right and this 25-year project in the making isn’t meant to find the god particle. I’m not saying I want to utter, “told ya so” after there is gaping black-hole where the Alps used to be, but what else can go wrong? At least we have two months before they fire up the Death Star beam again. Sciam; image via Dvice → Read More
When it comes to running a gigantic machine capable of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum that could suck the entire earth (and more) into oblivion, it’s probably safe to assume that you can never be too careful. This week was supposed to be the week that the Large Hadron Collider sent two proton beams careening at almost the speed of light in opposite directions on a literal crash course of scientific achievement. However it seems that on Wednesday of this week, testing was “interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero,” according to the Times. Everything’s now working again and the first protons should collide next week at 6% of the machine’s maximum power, followed by a 70% collision next month. → Read More
According to InternetNews.com, the Large Hadron Collider project that we’ve been hearing so much about runs a customized version of Linux called CernVM. Apparently it ran Vista at first, but the Aero interface kept slowing down the proton acceleration. Try as they might, scientists just couldn’t get the Windows Experience Index above a 4.2. I kid, I kid. There was also an interesting comment left on the original article that appeared to be sent from a CERN IP address: “While VMware is in use, the primary configuration for machines in the LHC computing grid is based on Scientific Linux distribution running directly on the hardware. This grid is used to receive and distribute the 15PB of data across the 100,000s of CPUs across the world.” Cool. Nice work, Tux. → Read More
Well it looks like a world-ending black hole wasn’t formed at the site of the Large Hadron Collider and that we will, in fact, be putting in a full day of work today, tomorrow, and almost every remaining day of our lives. Hooray for science! → Read More
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will be activated this Wednesday. The LHC is a 17-mile long underground tunnel near Geneva that houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists use all this doohickery to smash protons together in order to recreate what they think happened during the initial stages of the Big Bang, specifically “the singularity” — the moment just before the Big Band occurred. While many in the worldwide scientific community seem to be on board with the experiments, “a small group of maverick scientists” are attempting to prevent the LHC from being fired up this Wednesday, fearing that the experiment “could create a devastating black hole” if things don’t go as planned according to the Daily Mail. Thanks to the massive amount of energy created by the LHC’s atom-smashing, if not controlled properly, things could apparently get ugly. → Read More
