5 posts tagged “lhc”

As I predicted, the most likely outcome of the LHC being turned on happened.... it broke.

Here's some lovely large pictures of the new experiments and detectors at CERN. Very Shiny. Give it a few years though and there'll be PhD students climbing up scaffolding to gaffer tape plastic sheets over it.
 

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready - The Big Picture

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years. (27 photos total)

Earth 'not at risk' from collider

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7...

Our planet is not at risk from the world's most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

Don't Panic!!

SF writer Bruce Sterling has some cool photos from the ATLAS pit at CERN. Start here and go "right" in the photostream.

If you want to know what it was like when I was at CERN, well, on the surface it was more or less like this. The OPAL detector was smaller than the LHC detectors, but it was still the same crazy mish-mash of engineering and computing. Once I dropped a roll of tape off the top of the Muon Endcap detectors, which were 12m high. God job no one was underneath. (And yes, I was gaffer taping up stuff on the detector.)