Large Hadron Collider @ CERN

[kinboshi]

just the tunnel itself is pretty amazing, the channel tunnel's pretty cool but anyone can dig in a straight line. a 27 km perfect circle's awesome

The tolerances are within millimetres as well.  Incredible. 

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

Cooling thousands of tonnes of the machine to within two degrees of absolute zero is a massive feat on its own.

Maybe they just get the Machine to tell MrsB she can't watch Lost...

Alternatively, they could have just built it in Aberdeen.

true...not much for common sense them CERN boys, are they?

Foreigners. 

yeah...loads smarter than us British and MUCH better looking than us British..but no common sense.

Inferior eyesight as well, obv.

[tikay]

Must be one of the most amazing feats of Civil Engineering & Science ever conceived & constructed.

Awesome, a thing of wonder.

[gatso]

Must be one of the most amazing feats of Civil Engineering & Science ever conceived & constructed.

Awesome, a thing of wonder.

going in your top 10?

[boldie]

just the tunnel itself is pretty amazing, the channel tunnel's pretty cool but anyone can dig in a straight line. a 27 km perfect circle's awesome

The tolerances are within millimetres as well.  Incredible. 

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

Cooling thousands of tonnes of the machine to within two degrees of absolute zero is a massive feat on its own.

Maybe they just get the Machine to tell MrsB she can't watch Lost...

Alternatively, they could have just built it in Aberdeen.

true...not much for common sense them CERN boys, are they?

Foreigners. 

yeah...loads smarter than us British and MUCH better looking than us British..but no common sense.

Inferior eyesight as well, obv.

that's why they all wear glasses. Bet ya they have exotic accents as well though...drives the ladies wild, I bet.

[tikay]

Must be one of the most amazing feats of Civil Engineering & Science ever conceived & constructed.

Awesome, a thing of wonder.

going in your top 10?

Yes, I think it must.

[kinboshi]

from: http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Facts-en.html

Facts and figures

The largest machine in the world...

The precise circumference of the LHC accelerator is 26 659 m, with a total of 9300 magnets inside. Not only is the LHC the world’s largest particle accelerator, just one-eighth of its cryogenic distribution system would qualify as the world’s largest fridge. All the magnets will be pre‑cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tonnes of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K).

The fastest racetrack on the planet...

At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11 245 times a second, travelling at 99.99% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each travel at a maximum energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), corresponding to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Altogether some 600 million collisions will take place every second.

The emptiest space in the Solar System...

To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum – a cavity as empty as interplanetary space. The internal pressure of the LHC is 10-13 atm, ten times less than the pressure on the Moon!

The hottest spots in the galaxy, but even colder than outer space...

The LHC is a machine of extreme hot and cold. When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space. By contrast, the 'cryogenic distribution system', which circulates superfluid helium around the accelerator ring, keeps the LHC at a super cool temperature of -271.3°C (1.9 K) – even colder than outer space!

The biggest and most sophisticated detectors ever built...

To sample and record the results of up to 600 million proton collisions per second, physicists and engineers have built gargantuan devices that measure particles with micron precision. The LHC's detectors have sophisticated electronic trigger systems that precisely measure the passage time of a particle to accuracies in the region of a few billionths of a second. The trigger system also registers the location of the particles to millionths of a metre. This incredibly quick and precise response is essential for ensuring that the particle recorded in successive layers of a detector is one and the same.
The most powerful supercomputer system in the world...

The data recorded by each of the big experiments at the LHC will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVDs every year. To allow the thousands of scientists scattered around the globe to collaborate on the analysis over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC), tens of thousands of computers located around the world are being harnessed in a distributed computing network called the Grid.

[technolog]

A hardon collinder?!    

If boshi gets any more excited, this could be worryingly prophetic.

[Newmanseye]

I may be wrong as it has been a while since i read it, I am sure the LHC featured in "angels & demons" by dan brown.

[gatso]

I may be wrong as it has been a while since i read it, I am sure the LHC featured in "angels & demons" by dan brown.

the tunnel at cern certainly did but whether it was the lhc in it or the previous machine I can't remember.

[Graham C]

was that Angels and Demons?  I thought it was one of his other books.

The film of A&D should be out sooner or later, we'll get to see it without having to visit Switzerland (or watch the iplayer)

[gatso]

I may be wrong as it has been a while since i read it, I am sure the LHC featured in "angels & demons" by dan brown.

the tunnel at cern certainly did but whether it was the lhc in it or the previous machine I can't remember.

yep, you're right, just had a quick flick through it, definitely lhc

[Newmanseye]

I just read the FAQ on the Cern website rearding the errors in the book relating to antimatter the LHC & its storage and so on, Dan Brown should really have telephoned these guys at CERN for the correct info.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html

[mondatoo]

A hardon collinder?!    

Made me Lol its the simple 1s that r the best.

On a seperate note angels n demons 10x better than da vinci code imo.

[Newmanseye]

This question and answer hgas got to make the next BB quiz.

Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?

Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules (1012  is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million).  For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.

You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.

To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):

E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.

This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.

At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram:  we would need 6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years!  It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.

[gatso]

This question and answer hgas got to make the next BB quiz.

I'm guessing you'll have no input to the next quiz