Large Hadron Collider restarts after two-year rebuild

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32160755

by raverbashing • 11 years ago

156 35 11 years ago

bbc.com

octoploid2• 11 years ago

http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...

Achshar• 11 years ago

I see it makes network calls in dev tools. Is this live? Because if it is then that's fascinating.

rorykoehler• 11 years ago

It seems to be live. Data is changing without needing to refresh

octoploid2• 11 years ago

Yes. It is live.

danbruc• 11 years ago

It is live, see the help link in the lower right corner.

espinchi2• 11 years ago

Yes, these public displays (internally called vistars or fixed displays) are a real-time stream. Essentially the same that's being broadcasted in the Control Center (the CCC), but at a (much) lower frame rate.

You can navigate and find others, like the ones focused on the luminosity that the experiments are getting (not yet useful), or on the injector accelerators.

(I was working on the vistar project for a year.)

victorantos• 11 years ago

the Tech.Info button link is dead redirecting to wikis/display/COIN/Machine+Status+Pages

gpmcadam• 11 years ago

He is reborn!

mkr-hn• 11 years ago

Took me a minute to remember this is a religious holiday, and that this is a joke based on it.

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

OT - SEO/Google-juice:

Glyphish domain must get some serious value out of being linked from cern.ch pages regardless of the fact CERN about to be linked from many of the social media sites. Wonder how much revenue that simple connection will earn.

Interestingly it seems the link was only required because CERN didn't want to pay the $99 license?

EGreg• 11 years ago

Is it just me or is the large Hadron collider really scary in how it can start a black hole chain reaction?

mitchty3• 11 years ago

Can you explain? The LHC produces energies that are less than what the earth has been bombarded with from cosmic sources since time immemorial.

Also what exactly is a "black hole chain reaction"? How are these black holes possible exactly? The energy involved in a single proton are not enough for a stable microscopic black hole to form. This is presuming it even CAN form (its at best a hypothesis) given our understanding of gravity.

sebastianconcpt3• 11 years ago

I guess is fear to unknown and unanticipated phenomena. Crazy high unpredicted outputs happened before (google operation Castle Bravo) so is not totally insane to consider a worst case scenario.

We don't have exactly a kickass theory (that's why we built the LHC in the fisrt place) and all we can talk (predict) about black holes formation is merely hypotetical.

I don't think we are in danger with this experiments other than draining taxpayers money at virtually zero ROI

sebastianconcpt3• 11 years ago

A sustained chain reaction requires a lot of things that here don't look likely to be set.

On the other hand, some ants playing with insecticide indeed searched for a sustained chain reaction and yieled x3 the anticipated output during operation Castle Bravo

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/those-who-witnessed-castle-...

r721• 11 years ago

The safety of the LHC: http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/safety-lhc

nn3• 11 years ago

It is just you.

bluedino• 11 years ago

Did some people theorize that testing a nuclear weapon could cause the entire atmosphere of the earth to ignite?

edmccard• 11 years ago

Yes, at one point Edward Teller ("father of the H-Bomb") thought that thermonuclear weapons might set off a self-sustaining fusion reaction in the atmospheric nitrogen.

I only know about this because as a kid I read a lot of pre-space-age sci-fi, and there was a story either by Heinlein or Asimov where the solution to this "danger" was to put nuclear fusion plants in orbit.

maxander• 11 years ago

Physicists have looked at all the angles on this, and are pretty certain there's nothing the LHC could do that would pose a threat to the world.

On the other hand, the universe still looks pretty empty of extraterrestrial civilizations, despite the availability of nice planets and so forth. Perhaps they were all pretty certain too.

cryptoz• 11 years ago

You can watch the live stream of the webcam on location if you are concerned about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JYkMhQ9gf8

cletus• 11 years ago

This reminds me of one of my favourite Google doodles ever:

http://www.google.com/doodles/large-hadron-collider

grey413• 11 years ago

Nope! Cosmic radiation causes much higher energy collisions in our atmosphere every microsecond of every day. Even if those collisions form black holes, our continued existence as non-singularities is evidence enough that they're not an issue.

deelowe• 11 years ago

No one ever made those comments seriously. This is similar to the "atomic bombs will ignite the atmosphere" comments that are misquoted.

A scientist makes a fanciful comment in jest and the media just runs with it. There's nothing to be concerned with going on at CERN. We can't even come close to the energies nature produces every day.

ufmace• 11 years ago

No, and here's a really detailed explanation as to why this couldn't possibly happen:

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-the-lhc-make-an-...

TL:DR:

1.) If these miniature black holes exist, the Earth has been getting hit by them for billions of years, and it’s still here. 2.) If you do create a miniature black hole, they will decay, via Hawking Radiation, on ridiculously small timescales. 3.) You can compute the rate at which a black hole eats matter, and it’s not even close to being as small as the lifetime of our planet.

blackMatterFood• 11 years ago

  the rate at which a black hole eats matter...


  ...it’s not even close to being as small as the 
  lifetime of our planet.

So the duration of time in which any given black hole might eat an amount of matter takes a lot longer than the age of the earth?

I think it's important to note that these things being discussed would potentially be micro-singularities, smaller than anything that might be visible to the naked eye.

Otherwise, it's pretty obvious that a planetary-scale black hole could handily destroy the earth in short order, by way of mere collision, whether consumes all of the earth's matter beyond its event horizon or not.

...anyway, yeah, the LHC's capacity for stranglets is otherwise negligible, and not very worrisome at all.

Large Hadron Collider restarts after two-year rebuild

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